What I’m Reading Now, Part 1

I generally try to finish one book before starting another. However, for reasons explained below, I am currently reading “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle, and “The Big U” by Neil Stephenson. Thanks, Lynn! This post will deal mostly with Stephenson and “The Big U”. Later posts in the series will deal with a non-fiction book related to “The Big U”, with “A Wrinkle in Time”, with other Lost-related books, and with the serendipitous “con-fusion” of Stephenson and Lost.

I’m reading “A Wrinkle in Time” because Sawyer was reading it on the beach. Among other books referenced in Lost, it has plot elements directly related to the story. I’m reading “The Big U” because it is a library book, and has to be returned soon.

For those of you not familiar with Stephenson, he is a great writer. His magnum opus is the Baroque Cycle, a trilogy of long, heavy novels set in the 1600’s: “Quicksilver”, “The Confusion”, and “The System of the World”. I find myself unable to write a brief summary, so I won’t even try. (Jeff, you want to try?) Suffice it to say anybody with a liberal arts education will appreciate them. “Cryptonomicon” is a follow-up novel (though written earlier) set in the current time and in WWII. Equally fascinating. I highly recommend them all. One of the main characters in the Trilogy is Jack (hmmmm), a character to rival Locke. Other Stephenson novels I have read are Snow Crash and Zodiac. I have his most recent, Anathem, on the shelf waiting for my attention. I didn’t enjoy Zodiac as much, though still a good read. And I read Snow Crash long ago. I don’t remember much about it other than its cyberpunk-ness. Stephenson has said that, after 9-11, he decided science fiction wasn’t serious enough, so he switched to historical fiction (although his historical fiction isn’t like any historical fiction I’ve read).

Recently I became interested in the utility tunnels and sewers running under many college campuses, including Michigan State. These radiate an irresistible draw on college students, many of whom have broken into them and used them for all manner of silly and vile activities. While we were at Michigan State, a child-prodigy college student named Dallas Egbert (seriously) vanished from the campus and from the face of the Earth. The story dominated campus news for months. Theories abounded, among them that he had been playing a physically real version of Dungeons and Dragons in the tunnels, and had been killed. That turned out to be not quite true, and he was eventually found. His story is told in “The Dungeon Master” by his former attorney William Dear. I look forward to reading that after I finish “The Big U”.

“The Big U” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_U ) is set on the campus of American Megaversity, whose foundation is also riddled with tunnels and sewers. The book is a brilliant satire of life on a college campus. Written in 1984, it feels only slightly dated. Though its events occur on a large campus, graduates of Kalamazoo, Blackburn, and Illinois Wesleyan will recognize many of the groups it satirizes. Among them are the self-named Airheads (a female dorm wing), members of the Physics Club and the Computing Club who also tend to be members of Megaversity Association for Reenactments and Simulations (M.A.R.S.), the Stalinist Underground Batallion, and the Temple of the Unlimited Godhead. Stephenson ( http://web.mac.com/nealstephenson/Neal_Stephensons_Site/Old_site.html
) wrote the novel while at Boston University, on which it is not-so-loosely based. He was not proud of it, calling it “a first novel written in a hurry by a young man a long time ago." The novel had been out of print for years when Stephenson discovered that it was selling for hundreds of dollars on ebay. He reluctantly allowed it to be republished saying “the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it”. I respectfully disagree.