Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A long, meandering, Europe-trotting historical which alternates stretches of ponderous natural philosophy with stretches of hilarious piratical shenanigans, to somewhat dubious effect. I enjoyed this, the way you enjoy a book that you read in 100 page chunks over the span of a year, and it's worth noting that I could do that since there's very little throughline. But the thing is.

The thing is, Stephenson made a conscious choice to mix his oodles of historical research with a modern prose sensibility. Which is fine, since it's not like the novel as we understand it – and as Stephenson writes it – was actually invented yet when this book is set. But his particular modern prose sensibility is basically a transcription of the stylings of an overeducated hipster douche kicking back in a hipster douche bar, telling his hipster douche friends about that time he got lost on vacation and nearly died of malaria, but the entire point of the story is to be arch and ironic and detached about the whole thing, because let's be honest, nothing bad could truly ever happen to this hipster douche, that just isn't how the world works and he knows it. I mean, he's a funny dude! He tells a great story! But there's a very fine line.

Basically, somewhere around page 700, right about where a couple of characters were observing a rape and contemplating their imminent enslavement and death, and all they did was make arch, detached, hipster douche comments to each other about it, just as every other character had done on every other occasion from the wrenching to the banal to the sublime, right about then was when I thought oh come on, a single moment of genuineness wouldn't kill you.

Except this is Stephenson, so actually . . . it might.




View all my reviews

The Defining Decade

The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now by Meg Jay

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Make your popcorn, kids, and gather round: I read a self-help book.

Sooo….never read one of these before, and I always assumed that the audience of self-help books was composed largely of people who don't actually have what I think of as "problems." And by that I mean self-help books are for people dealing with something that can be dealt with, as opposed to something that can't. The difference between 'I need to learn to be more assertive' and 'my retina tore in half and it's inoperable' (true story). Because my assumption has always been that dealing with things that can be dealt with is a skill that results from all the shit you learn from the things that can't be dealt with.

This book did nothing to change my mind, since it assumes the reader doesn't have problems as I conceive of them, but instead is struggling with all that making way in the world stuff. You know – money, a vocation, love. And the idea is to, like, talk people through adulting. Does this actually work on anybody? Because I'm assuming it's a largely useless endeavor, since all of my learning has been of the other variety. The 'boy hospitals are quiet at 4 a.m.' variety, or the 'twiddly-doo, wish my STD tests would come back' variety (…true stories). So I find it difficult to imagine that reading a book that tells you in vague terms how some anonymized case studies handled finding a career would actually help anybody. But hey, maybe I'm wrong. I've learned a shit ton from books in my life; it's just all of those books were fiction, and somehow that works so much better for me.

Either way, this wasn't the book for me. Its cookie-cutter notions of what straight, able-bodied, self-doubting life looks like have very little to do with how my twenties went. I mean, my twenties were, in retrospect, fucking insane. I crammed a massive amount of stuff into one decade, and had yet more crammed in on me.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but actually, you know what? I rocked it. I rolled that decade like a motherfucking cigarette and smoked it. I got a couple degrees and was poor and was rich and fucked a bunch of people and read amazing books and found my person and said "it's cancer, okay, coping initiated" and wrote a million words of crap and a few words of not crap and lost my eye and lost my mind and clawed it back and earned my way into an amazing one-in-a-million job and sang every day and walked away from my parents and learned and learned and learned.

And I screwed stuff up. All the time. But this book seems entirely irrelevant to that. Or to anything else I'm carrying right now. What can it possibly tell me about yesterday's negative pregnancy test that I don't already know?

Though I guess it did crystalize for me that I have done okay. And never having been asked to take stock like that before, I suppose that's nice.

But really. Does this stuff actually help anybody?




View all my reviews