I think you're right that everything else I read is going to pale next to The Baroque Cycle, but I can't really bring myself to regret having read it first--if I ended up not reading any more Stephenson at all, at least I would have read the best and worthiest. And while Cryptonomicon will probably suffer more than the unrelated works, it might be better that I didn't read it as his first work--the women in Cryptonomicon bothered me a lot, but not nearly as much as they would have if I hadn't already seen that Stephenson can write a phenomenal female lead (not to mention a male lead as purely likable and sympathetic as Daniel Waterhouse).
Ooh, Eddings, low blow. I have, in my time, loved Eddings, but he deserves that for having written the same series twice and tried to pass it off as the repetition of a mythic cycle within the lifetime of one set of characters. There's nothing sadder than an author trying to disguise a weakness in his or her writing by having the characters excuse it.
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ninetydegrees
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on 2007-04-10 02:44 am (UTC)Ooh, Eddings, low blow. I have, in my time, loved Eddings, but he deserves that for having written the same series twice and tried to pass it off as the repetition of a mythic cycle within the lifetime of one set of characters. There's nothing sadder than an author trying to disguise a weakness in his or her writing by having the characters excuse it.