Billy’s Comments (group member since Jun 13, 2012)

Billy’s comments from the The Dapper Gentlemen of Letters group.

I realize we already have our next book poll up, but for the following one, a possibility to add might be Jonathan Tropper's One Last Thing Before I Go. Seems to be getting some pretty strong buzz.

One of my students last semester recommended Outliers to me. It sounds interesting.

I just got Pulphead, a book of essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan, a couple weeks ago. It's supposed to be a strong read if nonfiction is your thing. Dave Eggers and Richard Ford both published new novels recently. I've also heard good things about The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death, by Jill Lepore.

Art of Fielding would also be a fine choice with me.

I agree with Brian that the MMO element was underused. And on the subject of identity, most of the characters just seemed very cardboard to me. Richard and Zula were multi-dimensional and somewhat interesting. Chet, although a bit player, actually seemed like one of the more well-rounded, fully fleshed characters. Sokolov just felt like a stock bad-ass spy archetype, Jones a stereotypical villain, Csongor a manchild, and Marlon was furniture. This, along with the unnecessary attention to extraneous details, were my biggest complaints about the book.

I know I'm sounding harsh and negative, and it's true that I didn't love this, but on the positive side, I did find some of the action sequences gripping. There were a couple of hundred pages here and there that were page turners. It felt like it could've been a tight 400-500 page read and been much better for it, particularly if Stephenson had focused more, as Brian mentioned, on questions of how identity and reality can be complicated when real and virtual worlds intersect, rather than simply relegating T'Rain to a plot device used to bring characters together.

I'm a little over halfway through it. I'll echo the detail heavy comments. I actually find that to be sort of a weakness, since many of the details seem so irrelevant - lengthy descriptions of boats and guns and vehicles, like Stephenson figures he's done all this research on military weaponry, so it's got to get included somehow, even if it slows things down.

Anyway, overall I'm finding the book decent so far. The first 100 pages or so were extremely slow, then when all the gangster stuff started, it became pretty exciting for a while; but in the aftermath of the building exploding, the next 150 pages or so became a bit of a crawl for me, again, because of the sheer amount of extraneous detail.