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Comment by paggle | Hacker News Reader

Ugh Donna Tartt's books are such horrible juxtapositions of beautiful writing and terrible plots. If she crafted worse sentences I could just skip her awful books but the way she writes leaves me in the position of feeling compelled to read them and then hating how dumb the plots are.

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Sounds like my reaction to Neal Stephenson. His phrasing is godly. His plotting is godawful.

My "favorite" part of The Diamond Age was when he had a whole scene solely so one character could explain to the reader what another's (lame) motivation had been for the last half the book or so, as it had been in no other way established or explained up 'till then and the book was about to wrap up.

For all of my problems with Neal, The Big U is an amusing read.

I think it's because he hadn't learned a whole lot of bad pacing habits at that point, but had already developed a strong descriptive style. Snow Crash is an evolution of that. The pacing is a mess, but entertainingly so, and the first-class descriptive writing and dialogue makes up for it.

He desperately needs an iron-fisted editor in his life. It's a tragedy that he doesn't.

In what ways is the “pacing” of Snow Crash a “mess”? Not really familiar with the concept of pacing. Thanks

Every time I read a Stephenson novel I have to break through that first quarter to a third before I'm fully taken in. It's like a dog or cat finding a comfortable position to sleep in. Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, all require me to push through that first part before I can get comfortable.

I had tried (and failed) to read Crypto about 3 times before I finally broke through and realised his plotting wasn't bad, he just couldn't set it up right, or something.

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