I like Neal Stephenson's talks (e.g., Authors@Google, his Slashdot interview, etc.) a lot, so I've felt ok with letting Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver sit on my shelf for years. I picked up Snow Crash after enjoying reading his brother-in-law's blog https://sawiggins.wordpress.com---this is relevant because Stephenson credits discussions with said brother-in-law for a lot of the Asherah and Sumerian mythology backstory---and then recently getting more interested in Sumerian and Canaanite mythology through my own brother-in-law. What I mean is, I wanted to see how a hacker-cum-speculative fiction writer addresses ancient and modern religion. Most hackers (technical term used in this book and in regular life to mean "maker"), I think, are interested in religion. Well, most hackers are interested in everything---and being interested in everything will help finish reading this book.

Stephenson's writing is awkward and ugly, contrasting equally with the euphony of, say, Tolkien and the slickness of the average popular SF writer. Every few pages, a firework of a simile explodes. There's an encyclopedia's worth of juicy tangents and interesting asides. You all know this. You all will read it someday, and some will make it to the end. And it will be good.

Back to slinging code. And applying modern germ theory to three thousand year old histories.