Cryptonomicon wrote:I seem to recall you mentioning the Casanova's biography like a year or so ago. I would agree on the Pulitzer remark. Per my nickname, I gave to ask, any read any Neal Stephenson?
And if that isn't MxO enough, do you ever try and incorporate new and/or low-level players, say less than level 10, into events?
I've tried that in the past, like with sort of welcoming events or parties in Uriah, but it's kind of tricky...also often counter-productive since the odds are pretty good that you're in fact just interacting with some veteran's new alt.
I don't think I've heard of Neal Stephenson... Oh,
Snow Crash. I've heard of that, at least. But I don't tend to follow modern authors very closely. I'm finding more and more that what attracts me in books is not only a slow, carefully developed story, but, maybe even more importantly, the author's language; I don't mean French or English or whatever, necessarily, but the way in which they write; so much contemporary writing is just incredibly flat next to the sound of Shakespeare, Melville, Radcliffe, Thackeray, Malory, Trollope, Twain, old Russian writers, even in translation, like Turgenev and Pushkin, and others like Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, even relatively recent writers like Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Margaret Mitchell, and Faulkner. Really, I think the blunt modernist mode made ubiquitous by Steinbeck and Hemingway--while I like a lot of what those two wrote--has completely ruined contemporary writing. We no longer write with an ear to tone, meter, and harmony; we don't even have anything like the breadth of vocabulary or mastery of language that the leading English writers had a century ago. Now it's just shock-jock schlock, for the most part.
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