Snow Crash

I like to read Neal Stephenson because I feel smart when I read Neal Stephenson. I feel smart and cool, much cooler than I actually am.  I get to roll out my cyberpunk cred (earned back in my teens when I went through a wicked bout of insomnia that lasted for a few years and battled it with copies of Omni magazine.)  I  A friend gave me a copy of Cryptonomicon when he learned that I had been a code freak as a kid and from that point I was hooked.

I have read Snow Crash before.  With any other book, that would mean maybe a couple of hours reading but Stephenson's writing is pretty dense.  I noticed that I paid more attention to the hacker religion mythology sections and they made sense (yeah, I'm confessing that sometimes the book defeated me, I'm thinking that it had something to do with my skimming habit). Maybe I'm getting philosophical in my dotage ;D but it all hung together for me this time. 

I adore the hero... Hiro.  Hiro Protagonist, samurai hacker.  I saw a guy getting out of the pool at the Y yesterday that could have been him (you know, if he wasn't fictional).  Hot.  He's not that far off of my age in the book and he's finally starting to feel like a grown up.  It was like watching him put away childish things.

It'll probably be a few years before I read this one again but I've started another one of Stephenson's books on the right now.  It was a confusing one for me too.