"Reamde"

[fiefoe]

It's easy to see why this book isn't as well reviewed as other Neal Stephenson books -- it's almost too accessible. The family reunion took forever, but after that things moved quickly.

• In high school she’d been quiet, a little too assimilated, a little too easy to please in a small-town farm-girl sort of way.
• So much quicker to work it out on his own than suffer through someone’s well-meaning efforts to educate him—and to forge an emotional connection with him in so doing.
• The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.
• “And then you skinned it?” No, it politely climbed out of its own pelt before giving up the ghost.
• THE VEHICLE RODE so low that getting out of it was like climbing out of one’s own grave.
• FedExing hundred-dollar bills to Taiwan, where the money was laundered through the underground Filipino overseas worker remittance network
• Their most fundamental innovation was that they built it from the ground up to be gold-farmer-friendly.
• ... up to his standards of realism. Which meant that every nuance of the terrain encoded a 4.5-billion-year simulated history of plate tectonics, atmospheric chemistry, biogenic effects, and erosion.
• Reader, they bought his IP.
• “He thinks that the elf/dwarf split was born in the era when Cro-Magnons coexisted in Europe with Neanderthals.”
• “Exactly. I looked through archived web pages and shareholder disclosures to learn the names of some of the other clients who’d hired the same contractor to set up retail websites during the same period of time.”
• “But ever since the Forces of Brightness went all Pearl Harbor against the Earthtone Coalition—”
• Because guys, at least of his age, didn’t have the confidence to make major decisions from their gut like that. They had to build a superstructure of rational thought on top of it. But not Zula. She didn’t have to decide. She just had to pass on the news.
• But, like a tenement dweller nurturing a rooftop garden in coffee cans, she had cultivated and maintained a little social life of her own, and harvested the occasional ripe tomato, and maybe enjoyed it more intensely than someone who could buy them by the sack at Safeway.