Hitchhiking

I finally finished reading Cryptonomicon last night (which is now the longest book I've read cover to cover), and felt good enough about it to give it my seal of approval. A lot of Amazon reviewers have suggested that about five hundred pages could have been excised from the book without taking away from the basic plot. Well, that's true, but then it would have sucked. Taking away Stephenson's random tangents, like the maintenance of his grandmother's Lincoln or the proper method of eating Cap'n Crunch (which are some of the best passages in the book) would just make this another run of the mill thriller. So, I'm going to go ahead and give Stephenson a big thumbs up for writing something this long and an even bigger thumbs up to the publisher for letting it go to market.

Anyhow, this means I'm on to reading something else - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams. Or, the second book in his trilogy of five Hitchhiker's Guide books. I read the original last month, figuring that it was important to know how good the book was so that I could adequately trash the movie (should it be, as most Hollywood adaptations of SF are, horrible). I picked up the surprisingly affordable Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide, which contains all five books plus a bonus short story, while I was in Chapters, selling one of my own books (Ironic? I think so - my book, after all, would never be stocked by Chapters, and there I was standing in the middle of the science fiction section, selling it, while other customers milled around slowly, flipping through the latest John Ringo title and sighing).