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Best and Worst Books of 2003?
Thousandstars writes "I saw the article on the best and worst movies of 2003, and, being a literature geek, I thought it would also be appropriate to ask for the best and worst books of 2003. In fiction, Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver is toward the top of my best list. How about everyone else?"
Quicksilver was a cool book. However, IMHO it wasn't nearly as good as Cryptonomicon. Here's why:
* The characters feel similar to those in Cryptonomicon (another crazy Shaftoe, Daniel Waterhouse is akin to the main character from Crypto).
* One of the hardest things to do right when there are parallel plotlines is connect them in a flowing and lucid manner. Cryptonomicon did an excellent job of weaving the past and present together. In Quicksilver, we get large chunks of uninterrupted narration, but there's very little context switching. This left me a little bored at times.
It really felt rushed, like there was a great book in there that needed more time to be distilled.
Don't get me wrong, I'm going to read the next two volumes, I was just a little disappointed that Quicksilver didn't live up to the high standards Stephenson has set himself in previous books.
After _Cryptonomicon_ my expectations were high. Early on in _Quicksilver_ I realized that there was no way this book could be as good as the earlier one, so I adjusted my hopes downward accordingly...and even then, I was disappointed.
The flaws are numerous.
The one thing that everyone knows about the book is that it contains a frantic pile of trivia. I was actually looking forward to this aspect of the book, given that I enjoy random learning opportunities as much as the next geek, and given that this is one part of _Cryptonomicon_ that I was enthused about. _QS_ disappoints in this regard. To my mind there are two main bins that trivia are sorted in to: (1) those random items that are capable of clicking in an interesting way into the knowledge structure I already have; and (2) utterly random tidbits. NS delivered a few of the former, and a few truck-loads of the latter. In so far as the trivia was interesting, I already knew it (Germanic witch trials, etymology of the word "dollar", the broad outlines and purposes of the various 16th century political structures), and in so far as the trivia was not something I already knew, I found it dreadfully boring (hail-storms of random names of royalty, many of them playing minimal roles in the plot, etc.).
Ah. I used the word "plot", so I've segued onto the next region of disappointment. _QS_ does not have a plot, in the conventional sense. Sure, in a 900 page novel (or a 2,700 page novel, really), one wouldn't expect the broad sweep of the action to be clear by page 50, or 100...but by page 500 or so, one would hope to have an idea of where things might be going. The book has Theme aplenty.
The Theme, however ("Things Really Changed a Whole Lot, Religiously, Economically, Politically, and Scientifically"), is big, but too insubstantial and too vague to construct a huge novel like this on. _A Winter's Tale_ managed to work very well with out a real plot - it could hang off of the Theme that "New York changes a lot, and is magical through the ages". Then again, _A Winter's Tale_ was about 1/9th the length of Stephenson's Inflated Series.
Speaking of inflation, this book needed an editor, badly. Dialogue and exposition are clunky in many many places. For that matter, dialogue and exposition are poorly differentiated. There's a joke about 1950's science fiction that 3/4 of the plot and background information are revealed in "As you know, Bob" asides. The same is true of _QS_. There's some minor variation on a theme: there's "As you know", there is "I need not mention the fact that X ...< 1,000 words
elided >...because you already know that", and there is "as everyone in
the town knew...".
There's a persistent and pernicious meme in the art world that to truly convey some situations you need to recreate those situations for the audience. Thus, the only way to convey tedium is through a four hour movie, etc. NS seemed to be held by this meme: to convey the intellectual ferment and vast scope of the 17th century he felt the need write a book that was adrift in a ferment and vast in scope. Certainly he could not have conveyed these things in a novella, but that does not mean that he could not have pruned perhaps a third of what he wrote.
The book is large enough that there's a Dramatis Personae at the end, which was somewhat useful...but it didn't work wonderfully well for me, because the entries were fairly short and defined the characters (well, historical figures) mostly in terms of descriptors and events that did not take place inside the book. If I come across a character who I know was present 500 pages earlier, but I'm trying to remember whether that character was a alchemist or a merchant, it helps little to learn that the character was a friend of the Duke of Wessex (or what have you). This is not a huge departure from how Dramatis Personae are usu
And I have to agree with those bashing Robert Jordan, even though I haven't read his latest pile of crap. WoT is a series that started out so amazingly good, then was ruined by its author. It's his maddeningly slow pace, and more importantly, the fact that every single one of his female characters (except perhaps Min) is an arrogant b!tch. They're all extremely annoying, some more so than others.
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As an unabashed and yet notoriously picky (read: pain in the ass to buy for) sci-fi fan, here are a few of my favorite books of 2003.
I just finished China Mieville's Perdido Street Station and I am flabbergasted. Mieville's city-state of New Crobuzon is utterly fantastic and his clarity of vision for his world, in my opinion, is the kind you only come across once in a great while. I will most certainly be picking up his newest novel, The Scar , as soon as I finish a couple of books curently in my queue.
I was delighted that in the last year (or perhaps a little bit more), the great Samuel R. Delany's books have begun coming back into print. Three of his novels, Dhalgren , Nova and the duplex Babel-17/Empire Star , along with his short story collection Aye, and Gomorrah... and other stories are all truly wonderful sci-fi. If you decide to read him, start with Aye, and Gomorrah..., Babel-17/Empire Star and then Nova; when you think you have a handle on him, tackle Dhalgren. Tackling Dhalgren is no easy task, but the journey is completely worth it.
Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow now has two books in print ( Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and A Place So Foregin and Eight Mor e) and a third on the way. Both books (a novel and a short story collection respectively) showcase a writer I am quite sure we'll be seeing a whole lot more of in the future. Doctorow's writing reads very much like the first writer of the next generation of sci-fi writers; you won't be disappointed.
Cyberpunk poster boy William Gibson also had a new book this year, Pattern Recognition . As his writing pressed forward, Gibson has slipped further and further from futurity into today, creating science fiction that happens in today's world. His latest work is an interesting story of Cayce Pollard, a cool-hunter with a severe allergy to brands. The story is, as with all things Gibson, tightly written and as focused as a laser beam on its subject. A great read for all.
I sure hope this helps. I know not all the books came out specifically in 2003, but I read them all in 2003 (along with countless others) and I think that's close enough for me to sneak them in.