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I thought The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon were Stephenson's best books. The Diamond Age is technically in the same universe as Snow Crash, though that doesn't really mean much since it has a much more sober tone. In these two books he gets a great stride going, where some real feeling emerges naturally from the comic style somehow. I'd like to be able to describe this better, but I've sat at the keyboard for about ten minutes now and can't think of how. I couldn't stand his new books, though--they feel like a mimicry of his style that's built on a misunderstanding of why it works, as if the earlier stuff was just him getting lucky.

Like a lot of people, I'd recommend Hard-Boiled Wonderland before any other Murakami. I actually liked it because it wasn't all that disjointed. The plot had holes and ugly aspects (like the omniscient explanatory monologue, from a professor, no less), but it was comprehensible and worthwhile. The only other novel of his I liked was The Wind-Up B. C. becaue the length actually worked for it, somehow. It's very disjointed, but being immersed in such a large expanse of disjoined elements makes them stand out less. You may think "this isn't gonna get explained" (and you'd usually be right), but you won't often think "this is the last I'll hear about this" just because the book is so long.

I've got a copy of Nabokov's Speak, Memory that someone gave me. I wonder how I'll like it--it's his autobiography. I've read Lolita and Pale Fire. I loved the former but disliked the latter because the protagonist's delusions are more about brute physical facts than how people work or his own mental capabilities and social standing.
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Broco:

Interesting stuff. I've wanted to like one of Nabokov's books other than Lolita for a fairly superficial reason: Lolita is so freaking popular. Its fame has caused so many people to read / "read" it, even people who don't care much about literature, that the statement "I like Lolita" doesn't suggest as much as it should about your taste/worldview to other people. People who love, say, Shakespeare probably also have this problem, since everyone "loves" Shakespeare, even people who barely know who he is.
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Re: Lolita adaptation. I haven't seen it, but I'd personally say that if you want to create something new and good from the "outline" of a book you should just throw away any pretense at adaptation. There are already enough works around that are "inspired by" others or "revisit" them without claiming to be them, even within one medium. As CubaLibre pointed out, movies have different strengths, so there's nothing plagiaristic or useless about applying those strengths to Lolita-like themes. You just shouldn't try to convince people that it's some kind of accurate version of Nabokov's work, if it isn't.

I guess, with the necessary differences between films and books, I'd be advocating against all literary adaptations, with that argument. Though things like, say, Harry Potter are different because even the fans will tell you the strength of the original isn't in its medium-specific characteristics (like prose), except perhaps its length.
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I didn't like Childhood's End. The subject of the second part was kinda cool, but the third part ruined it.
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Yeah, Oshima was fun, and kind of the book's saving grace. I went out of the book largely hating it for its slowness and the wishy-washy fake Oedipus plot, but wishing the library existed so I could hang out there. (Speaking of the fake Oedipus plot, there was this one interview where Murakami was asked "so, tell us more about how this a modern Oedipus story" and he was like "uhh, I thought it'd be kinda cool to do something like Oedipus, so I made the kid look for his dad and like that woman who's kinda like his mom, but I just made shit up from there and it's not Oedipus-like in any deep way." Classy.)
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Not having read the book, I've had the same impression as boojiboy. It's not even so much that it sounds "zany" as that it sounds like 1000 pages of consistent zany. It's one thing if, say, you have a fairly normal fictional edifice and then a bunch of crazy shit starts happening. That actually makes an impact. It's another thing if the book screams watch out, this shit is pretty crazy! from page one, and continues until you fall asleep. Which is what I imagine DFW's fiction being like.

(I've read some of his essays, which are entertaining but kinda sloppily written and factually suspect. It's funny that he gets such a reputation for intelligence, when his style consists of packing every single word he thinks of into every sentence, and anyone with expertise in the subject matter can tell that his facts are off. And his descriptivism/prescriptivism article made me want to stab the page, since he spent about 50 pages missing the point, ultimately drawing a "compromise" conclusion that's really what most descriptivists think [except for the ones in DFW's head].)
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Ya rly. I don't have any of his essays here with me, but here are some things other people have written:
about "Everything and More" (warning: long pdf)
About that linguistics article (scroll down)

Note that in the second one, I'm not advocating Language Hat's position on the article as a whole. I thought the article had a more subtle point, at the very least, than "you've got to learn and use all those fourth-grade grammar rules." But we're talking about facts and terminology, and there the Hat is right on.
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A few quick notes:

-I don't hate Wallace as an essayist as much as it may have sounded. I really liked "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" and "A Supposedly Fun Thing..." for example. But it's for the emotional/psychological content, not for the "erudition" that he seems to be most famous for.

-Yeah, the Language Hat guy is pretty snide, and only opposes Wallace's argument in the most indirect of ways. What it shows, I think, is that Wallace doesn't always use his esoteric references in the correct ways. I agree that the essays have substance beyond those references, but that's irrelevant to this particular point; for better or worse, many seem to value Wallace's writing largely for the references and, er, "smartness," and so it's worth considering those aspects on their own.

-Check out the Everything and More link for an article with a much more balanced tone that still points out errors (to the point of considering, even, that E&M is a several-hundred-page parody of pop-technical writing).
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