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doctorcath

Bookivorous

I read books, I write about books, I would probably marry a book if I could find one who liked me enough. Three words to describe me mature, irresponsible, contradictory, unreliable...oh...that's four...

Book Brawl: Lexicon vs Snow Crash

One of the things I loved about Snow Crash was the whole idea of language as the tool of ultimate power. There's something mysterious about the origins of language and about that time, way back in the past, when we all spoke the same tongue. What was that language like? How did we arrive at those original names? Did those words have a purity and directness that we've now lost over the millennia?

 

Neal Stephenson, writer of Snow Crash, had a lot of fun with all of those questions and so did I reading about his near-future LA of privatized mini-countries and semi-biological guard dogs.

 

I had so much fun that when I came across Max Barry's new book Lexicon and saw it centered around the same ideas, I had to read it and compare the two. The result was an article for LitReactor. If you've read either of these books, what did you think?