(urth) instant new fan

[Jerry Friedman]

From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
>Daniel Petersen wrote:
>> Looking forward to taking a big
>> bite out of his oeuvre, but, recommendations notwithstanding, I'm still
>> totally puzzled about how best to begin to tackle its voluminous bulk!
>
>You could do worse than to start at the beginning. _Snow Crash_ is a
>very funny book, if you can deal with the kind of humor that names a
>book's main character "Hiro Protagonist." Others really like _The
>Diamond Age_, but it didn't do much for me. I recommend going to the
>recent _Anathem_, a dark alternate-world novel.

Actually, /The Big U/ was the first. I found it intermittently amusing, but a lot of people didn't find it amusing at all. I second the recommendation to start with /Snow Crash/.  I haven't read /Anathem/, and I agree with Dan'l about /The Diamond Age/.
 
On Antonin's comment, I'm both a Gibson and a Stephenson person, though I like /Neuromancer/ better than anything by Stephenson that I've read.  Likewise I like both /The Lord of the Rings/ and /Bored of the Rings/, though I haven't reread the latter since I was a teenager.
 
Where are the Wolfe parodies?
 
Jerry Friedman