"People who had job titles and business cards could say easily where they worked and what they did for a living, but those who worked for themselves, doing things of a complicated nature, learned over time that it was not worth the trouble of supplying an explanation if its only purpose was to make small talk. Better to just go directly to airline travel."
- Neil Stephenson, Reamde, p. 14
So not the first lines, but a good quote nontheless. I had forgotten what an entertaining writer Stephenson is, even when he's not distilling a complicated technology or arguement down to its essence. I was scared after abandoning Anathem - a book I found to be needlessly obscure - that Stephenson had lost his technically savvy voice that I came to love in Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon. Based on the first 70 pages (of a 900+ page novel!), my fears were misguided, for I'm already hooked and can't wait for nighttime to come so I can dive back into this world again.
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