Some Remarks

Reading this blog, it becomes readily apparent that I am a big fan of Neal Stephenson.  I have read the majority of his books and am eagerly awaiting his next novel, whatever that may be.  I ordered his book, Some Remarks, because I thought it would make for interesting, light reading on my holiday travels.  Some Remarks, was billed as a collection of Neal Stephenson's shorter works that were generally not reprinted.  I was interested to read a series of works from him from across his career. 

The first thing that surprised me about the book was how small it was.  I am used to my Neal Stephenson books easily breaking the 500 page mark.  Coming in at just over 300 pages, this was noticably physically smaller than all of my other books by him.  However, it is a collection of short pieces and so I am not sure that he has another 200 pages of short work laying around.

Most of the pieces have been previous published in some medium or other with two exceptions. However, unless you devotedly snap up literally everything Stephenson writes, this will probably be mostly new material.  As someone who has read most of Stephenson's novels, I had a fun time seeing how he got ideas for parts of them in some of the articles.

The longest article in the book, by a wide margin, is called "Mother Earth, Mother Board".  At almost 120 pages, it takes up more than a third of the book.  This is a piece on laying an international cable from Europe to Asia and how the author went and visited various places that it went through or was in the process of going through.  This was clearly an inspiration for a lot of the modern day shenanigans in the modern part of Cryptonomicon.  However, it is really, really long for being about the subject that it is about.  Honestly, I think the book would have been improved if he had abridged it, and I am rarely for abridgement.

There are a number of other pieces in the book with topics ranging from treadmill desks to space travel.  There are also a few interviews where he discusses his opinions and also some of his works, depending on the times that the interviews took place.  Lastly, there are a couple of pieces of fiction which are interesting, one of which could be considered a connection between the end of Cryptonomicon and the beginning of Snow Crash which I enjoyed immensely because of my love of interconnected stories and cohesive canons.

While this is definitely Neal Stephenson's style, the short article or story format doesn't give him the time to set up that often makes his stories so worthwhile and good.  While the long cable laying article was interesting, undersea cable has never been one of my major interests and unfortunately that piece failed to inspire me to make it one.  That being said, the man is knowledgeable on a wide variety of topics, making this book an interesting read and, because he is such a good author, an enjoyable one as well.



Overall, I would give this book an 84%.