DNF : encore pour mon cours d’anglais, j’ai essayé mais j’ai pas eu la force ça part trop dans tous les sens

ok that was really fun

Holy crap, this is awful! Thank the gods I’m finished. Apparently, this was the guy’s first book, and it shows. I’ve been told Snowcrash is so much better, so I’ll read it, but then I’m done with this guy. So much NO.

Basically, it was all tell no show, and emotionally off-putting. Rather than being drawn in by the characters and their situations, I was actively pushed away from the characters and out of the story.

Run. Run far away.

Stephenson for me is hit or miss - this one - eh. Clearly his first novel that shows sparks of brilliance and some of the obsessions that will drive his later writing, but gives way to a kind of melodramatic chaos that wore thin for me.

Úff.

Ég gafst upp þegar ég átti innan við klukkutíma eftir (skv. kyndlinum) og svo stóð í tvö ár! Takk Goodreads fyrir að merkja upphafið fyrir mér, ég hefði ekki trúað því annars.

Ég skil Stephenson vel að hafa ekki viljað halda henni í prenti eftir að hann var kominn af stað, og farinn að skrifa betri bækur. Þetta er furðuleg skáldsaga spurningarmerki, og í besta falli kjúríó fyrir þá sem hafa lesið allan eða megnið af Stephenson og eru forvitnir um upphafið.

Sagan er kaotísk, það eru alltof margar persónur og við skyggnumst inní hausinn á alltof mörgum þeirra til þess að henda reiður á því hvað er að gerast. Frjálshyggjan stendur nakin og stolt uppúr prósanum og það er ekki sérlega fögur sjón. Það er eitthvað sem ég held að hái Stephenson ennþá að einhverju leyti, og hægur leikur að finna kafla í betri bókum hans sem sýnast til þess fallnar að hæða andstæðinga hinna sjálfsköpuðu frjálshyggjumanna sem koma hlutum í verk. En hér eru ljósaperurnar á stundum í sókratískum díalóg með fávitunum sem ekkert skilja og ekkert kunna, og það er átakanlega léleg bókmennt.

En aftur, sem kjúríó fyrir okkur lesendur, þá er ýmislegt að sjá og gaman að rekja þræði seinni bóka aftur að þessari hér. Því miður held ég að það sé of langt um liðið fyrir mig að rifja upp ákveðin dæmi, og ég nenni hreinlega ekki að fara í kyndils-undirstrikanirnar mínar.

Ekki lesa þessa bók nema ef þú ert einsog ég, sem las allstaðar að ég ætti ekki að lesa þessa bók en ég gerði það samt, þá skaltu gera það samt, en samt ekki gera það.

I love Neal Stephenson’s work in general. This book is clearly a very early work. You can see the beginnings of his talent - the many weird characters, the strange and scientific subplots, the political and cultural statements, and the huge event climax at the end.
That said, Neal really didn’t have the chops to pull this all off at that stage of his career. The pieces don’t really come together to pay off at the end, there are lots of threads left dangling and it was a bit of a hot mess.

The character I liked the most was supposed to be the villain, the university president. Not sure that was supposed to happen but maybe as a grownup I relate more to the administration than the goofy, prank playing students. The stuff about pennying people’s doors shut, throwing furniture out of dorm windows and having raucous themed parties reminded me of my days at SUNY-Binghamton.

But then, as now, it’s all fun until someone puts an eye out. And there are lots of eyes put out in this book. So it’s worth a read but don’t expect Neal to be at the top of his game.

I know the author considers this as juvenilia and tried to keep it out of circulation for some time, but it is very funny.

This book is plagued by unclear passages and lacks characters that you want to invest in which makes it feel like a waste of time at points. Despite that, I love it. The satire that Stephenson wields so well in later books is unrefined here in a way that works with targets as soft as higher education and college students.

Love that a major plot point here is shared with Anathem years later.

The Big U Book Review
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I picked up The Big U while I was organizing my library, and I decided to see if I still liked it ten years [at least] since the last time I had read it.

It turns out, I do! For me, this is the perfect college satire, on the same level as Thank You For Smoking or Office Space. I read it when I was an undergraduate, and it was hilarious, and a devastating send up of the bizarre world that is the American university. Ten years later, it is still hilarious and devastating. Then I flip to the flyleaf, and I find Stephenson wrote it in 1984.

Stephenson nailed the essence of university life in a way that is still relevant thirty years later. The LARPers. The Goddess worshippers. The terrible cafeteria food. The out of control parties. This is the American university, in all of its glory. American universities have long been at the center of the culture war, fostering, even encouraging, a hothouse culture in which the strangest things can flourish. Add to that a culture that has been intellectually static for the last hundred years, a guaranteed fresh supply of naive teenagers, and you will get a system that loops through the same obsessions, over and over and over.

In the introductory chapter, Stephenson's narrator says:

What you are about to read here is not an aberration: it can happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few years ahead of the rest.

This turns out to have been prophetic. In the Big U, we have all of the current obsessions of trendy politics. Rape culture. Identity politics. Minoritarianism. Endless curricular disputes. Weird religions. There are few things in the book so outrageous that they have not managed to happen in the last thirty years. It is all so ridiculous, and all so pertinent. I liked it the first time because it seemed very much like my alma mater. I like it now because it seems like all the universities in America. If anything, my own university has only grown more like American Megaversity with the passage of time.

It is fortunate this is a book and not a movie, because it prevents you from seeing out of date clothes and assuming everything in the book happened in the past. With a few minor changes, The Big U could easily be set today. The Stalinist Underground Battalion would have to be replaced with Occupy Wall Street, smart phones would have to be added in, and the university mainframe would have to be replaced with the web, but everything else could stay the same.

The first time I read this book, I was attracted to the commonalities to my own life. The character who was a budding physicist. The genius programmers. The awkward fit of so many of the viewpoint characters to the dominant party scene. Even the bit with the university locksmith [in college, I worked as a student locksmith for the university]. It just seemed to fit.

Ten years later, there are a few things I appreciate more now than I did the first time. The cynical university president is someone I can now identify with. The Big U administration made poor choices, but now that I have actual responsibility, I appreciate the heroic virtue that would be required to resist those temptations. S. S. Krupp is bright, decisive, and capable. His only flaw is putting the university's reputation [and lots of jobs] ahead of doing the right thing. I am glad I don't face the same choices, because it is hard to see how I could realistically do better in the same circumstances.

The sexual dynamic that drives many of the viewpoint characters is far more obvious in retrospect. Especially if you were a nerd [who I presume is Stephenson's target audience]. Teenagers are driven by their hormones in strange ways, nerdy teenagers even more so, and those of us who have survived that phase can only pity them. This too shall pass.

Of all Stephenson's books, this is the one I like best. The first Neal Stephenson book I ever read was Snow Crash. Snow Crash was recommended to me by my freshman year college roommate, and I liked it enough to try more, although I'm not sure its many fans realize it is a dystopia. The Big U was the second. I really liked The Big U, so I tried a number Stephenson's other books, but I never really enjoyed them. Stephenson wrote Zodiac when it seemed like dioxin was the worst thing ever made by humans. By the time I read it, the evidence was a little more mixed. Thus I had trouble taking the plot seriously. I couldn't get through even the first volume of the Baroque Cycle. Maybe this one was a fluke.

I choose to see it as a stroke of genius. Maybe this book couldn't have been written seriously or intentionally, because we are all too identified with sides in the on-going culture war that rages in the universities. Stephenson has a pretty clear side with the left-Libertarians now, but in this book maybe he hadn't quite found his voice, because even characters on the wrong side seem sympathetic, despite some salvos in favor of his clear favorites. As Lincoln and C. S. Lewis argued in their distinctive ways, the sides we are on, and the sides that are really in the right, may not necessarily turn out to be the same.

I can see why Neal Stephenson was embarrassed of this book. There is something quintessentially Stephenson about it—the pacing, the worldbuilding, the obscure references—but he clearly hadn't yet come into his own as an author. There aren't great scientific explanations, interesting sociological statements, or fascinating examinations of history. Still, the book kept me engaged and entertained, and I'm happy to have recognized how two of the concepts (nuclear waste stored in universities and a reference to "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind") reappear in his later works (Anathem and Snow Crash, respectively).

Early genius. Not as polished as later works, but has the same flow and mash up of eccentric ideas. Not recommended as a first book of his to read.

Unusual

Interesting read - first half excellent and second half odd. But, Stephenson can turn a phrase so lots of great lines.