Thomas Escritt > Recent Status Updates

Getting a little tired of parenthetic references to “the excesses of the secret police” or “communists being tortured or even shot” that aren’t allowed to disfigure a grand narrative about a wise ruler who calmly steered his country into … continued poverty?

Not really getting much of a sense of who he is, and if he ever does something bad it only ever emerges parenthetically

He wrote this purely to sneak in the assassin’s creed gag didn’t he

A bit sneery, no?

Revealing, yes - some remarkable vignettes about Zuckerberg and Sandberg and their narcissism but the constant drone of self-absolution is irritating. It’s very hard to believe this successful high-flier is the ingenue she presents herself as.

A mess, dozens of different themes rammed together with little structure. And the dialogue is intolerable: portentous and grandiose in tone

It seems stuck in the world of Arthur c Clarke style space cowboy exposition. Entertaining if written at Arthur c Clarke length, and who doesn't love a gigantic space engineering project, but at Stephenson length it tries the patience. It doesn't offer the giddying ideas of his other novels like Reamde. And I still have several hundred hard-work pages to go