The last few days have been spent, almost in their entirety, consuming The Diamond Age, the latest effort in my apparent quest to read Neal Stephenson’s works entirely in reverse of the order in which they were written. The joy I have taken in these two small glimpses of the arcane warrens contained in the author’s head, combined with my knowledge of others’ laments over the scarcity of these gems, almost overpower my compulsion to immediately dive into the next. Almost, but not quite. The fact that I will first have to wait for said gemological curiosity to be returned to the library that sometimes serves as its repository, and then drive to that location in another county, and also somehow manage to procure it before some other prospector snatches it from my grasp — that, and only that, is what prevents me from devouring it right now instead of writing this.

As a side note, all of this has led me to conclude that if I ever become one of the idle rich, that my chief effort in alleviating my own bourgeois guilt (these efforts are sometimes erroneously labeled charity; see Gates, Bill) will be donating copies of books that I perceive as Important, in great numbers, to the libraries of otherwise-middling intellectual backwaters. This undertaking will of course require great amounts of research into what books are indeed Important, the execution of which will become my chief occupation. And while I’m here in the realm of fantasy, I also would be amenable to the idea of procuring a pony.