February 14, 2005
On lengthy treatises
On Friday, a friend saw the two Stephenson books in my backpack; she immediately asked me if I never read anything of about, say, a hundred pages or so. Well, of course I do - I mean, the textbook for the Artificial Intelligence class at the Sofia University's Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics weighs in at a mere one hundred and fifty pages, and then you don't really have to read all of it ;) But the reason I'm writing this is that several hours later, just two minutes into Quicksilver, I came across this gem in Neil Stephenson's "Acknowledgements" section (italics are his own):
"Of particular note is Sir Winston Spencer Churchill's six-volume biography of Marlborough, which people who are really interested in this period of history should read, and people who think I am too long-winded should weigh."
For what it's worth, no, I don't think either the Cryptonomicon or Quicksilver are long-winded; but then, people have been known to accuse me of never knowing when to put a sentence/paragraph out of its misery, so maybe the reason I love this quote so much is that it finally provided me with an excuse :)
Posted by roam at February 14, 2005 12:47 AM
