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David_Gerard comments on Open Thread, July 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Aha, It happens to Redditors too! Rage comic, thread.
Trying to read Neuromancer when I was 11, after a local computer magazine had written about how it's basically the best book ever, was basically this all the time. I knew very few English cultural idioms back then, and Gibson really likes his cultural idioms, like "You ever the heat?" for "Did you use to be a cop?" I could read Stephen King novels in English fine at that point, but Neuromancer was just pages and pages of me having no idea what's going on, and I eventually gave up about a third in.
Not quite - this is talking about words you could understand but your attention wanders.
Did you ever come back to it, or try a translation?
I also get the thing where I stop understanding text just from not paying attention, and as far as I remember, the experience of reading that was the same. I don't remember ever being actively aware that I couldn't understand the text, just having the constant weird situation of reading sentences I seemed to be able to read just fine, but still ending with very little idea of what the narrative was.
I picked up the book again a couple of years ago and read it through without problem. That was also when I got a clearer idea of how the book was full of tricky narrative beats I'd have had no hope of understanding properly the first time around.
To be honest, I got that from Gibson first time through the trilogy and I'm a native speaker ;-) They made more sense on rereading.