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Notes -
Wow, The Diamond Age is my single favorite work of his as well! Given your dislike for those aspects of Reamde, I'd definitely tell you to stay away from Fall--it takes that reverse verisimilitude and cranks it up to 11, so much so that my favorite review of it described it as fractally bad. I would add that Fall is a dreadfully predictable wall-banger of a novel that's about as subtle as a brick to the head. Worse, it wears Neal Stephenson's style as a skin suit. Seveneves isn't that bad, IMO, if you can stand an expy of Neal DeGrasse Tyson being a character and played straight as a hyperintelligent protagonist, though there are other parts you might not enjoy as well.
So at this point I can't even read The Diamond Age any more in the sense that I'm so familiar with it that it fails to cohere into a narrative. It is now a text. I can recite long passages fairly accurately from memory and have a copy on my desktop because I tend to quote it a lot. When I try to read it it's just "this passage, then this passage, then this passage..."
All of this is a by-product of having read it so many times; didn't get this way on purpose.
By the way if you haven't listened to the audiobook narrated by Jennifer Wiltsie I'd strongly recommend doing so. Somehow hearing her read it called my attention to all sorts of details I hadn't really absorbed before. It felt like it somehow restored about 20% of the feeling of reading it for the first time. Plus I just think she's a perfect narrator for it. Actually listened to another audiobook narrated by her just because I enjoy her reading so much.
Hey BTW let me know if you ever do read City by Simak; iirc we'd talked about it a while ago.
Interesting! I'm not big on audiobooks as I tend to prefer the speed of reading and the imagery that my head evokes but there's definitely a lot to appreciate in a good narrator. I may have to give a James Marsters narrated Dresden Files novel at some point, for instance, because that sounds a lot like a Reese's Cup combination right there. But yes, I'll have to see how much the audiobook will set me back and I'll definitely drop a line if/when I pick up City and give it a read. I'm positive I've seen it on sale at the Kindle store at some point in the not too distant past so I view it as only a matter of time. :)
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