Snow Crash

Snow Crash, written by Neal Stephenson, has got to be one of the most horribly confusing by ultimately interesting book I have ever read. The book is about Hiro Protagonist, a half black-half Japanese male that is a suave hacker in the world of the metaverse and the best swordsman on the planet. He is joined by a female protagonist that goes by the name of Y.T, a 15 year old courier (a person who makes deliveries on a skateboard in this world), that eventually meets up with Hiro. The whole story revolves around them and a cornucopia of other minor characters that end up clashing together in a crazy story that will not fail to make you sit on every page thinking on what just happened.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, as many novels I read these days do not try to challenge the reader as intellectually as this novel. This is due to the fact that the story of this novel does not follow a clear cut path and often spirals into what seems to be the mundane into the absurd. What makes it so hard to follow is the fact that the novel starts off harmlessly enough, but then spirals into a plot about robot assassin dogs, huge aircraft carriers that harbor a population the size of a country, and a hiro (see what I did there?) that often gets into the most absurd situation. However, this does not mean that this book is necessarily bad; it may even be the best part of this novel. It breaks the bounds of the conventional with its absurdity that it is refreshing read which makes you stop every so often to try to piece together the plot in all of its craziness.

All this absurdity is then even added by the insane amounts of knowledge that the write then bestows upon us, especially around the middle of the novel. Through the fact that some of if not the majority of the novel takes place in the metaverse, the equivalent of an mmo like perfect world, a lot of text is situated in explaining the innerworkings of the system through the eyes of a hacker. Though to a hacker, such as I happen to be, it was easy to piece together most of the dialogue and immense amounts of information thrown at me. However, the another suspecting reader, this can  get confusing very fast and it will probably be a deal breaker for most readers. This unfortunately makes this novel a hard read for many and will result in  a lot of people giving up around 50 pages in due to the massive amount of confusion ultimately going to be settling on them.