Reading this book was kind of like... spending an afternoon on a long walk through the countryside, with a kindly but eccentric uncle, who happens to be a brilliant historian. I could listen to his rambling anecdotes for hours... except at some point I realised that we'd been walking for so long... hypnotised by his voice... that I had grown several inches of beard... It's a big book, but it's utterly fascinating and I loved it.I have 40+ books sitting on my 'review-soon' shelf that I just don't...

it took me about a year to get through this one. somewhat worth it, and i will get around to the second and third books of this gargantuan trilogy eventually. i learned a lot about the philosopher-scientists and byzantine politics and what it actually was like to live in the tumultuous times depicted...and didn't learn a whole lot about the inner life of a couple of the central characters. but there are dozens and dozens of truly fascinating and wonderfully written passages depicting all sorts o...

I think it's official: I hate Neil Stephenson's books. I hated his so called cyberpunk classic Snow Crash --a fact that sets me apart from most of the nerdegalian-- and I really hated Quicksilver.Quicksilver is kind of hard to classify, if you in fact insist on classifying it. It's kind of historical fiction in that it's set in the 17th and 18th century and follows the rise of empiricism and science. It features real people from that period, like Isaac Newton, Gotfried Leibniz, Robert Boyle, Rob...

Well. Where to start with this... Ok. Let us first pretend that there are only two criteria to use when analysing works of fiction, (1) number of characters and (2) richness of plot. Now let us say we are drawing a chart, with quality 1 on the horizontal axis, and quality 2 on the vertical axis. Now we have a space into which we can slot a few books lying around the house. A Dickens novel goes into the upper right quadrant of the grid - many characters and rich plot to bind them together. A Samu...

Neal Stephenson books are not for everybody. Actually, they are but not everybody will like them. This will certainly be the case for Quicksilver. It's a "love it" or "WTF did I just read?" kind of reaction. A NS book is often dense and erratic in the linear story. Mr. Stephenson has a myriad of interests and a sizeable intellect backing him up. His stories tend to delve in a variety of side topics (all of which are very informative but outside the normal story arc) and that can be off putting t...

(The following is an excerpt from the journal of Neal Stephenson.)After the success of Cryptonomicon, I’m having some problems narrowing down my next project. The issue is that I have far too many ideas, and I can’t decide which plot to use for my next book.I know that I want do something set during the late 17th century in Europe. It was an amazing time with huge changes in politics, culture, commerce and science, but there was just so much going on that I can’t seem to make up my mind and pic

I received an unexpected visit yesterday evening from a Mr. Nosnehpets, who told me he was a time-traveller and writer from the early 25th century. He had just published a historical novel, and wondered if I would do him the service of reviewing it."Why me?" I asked, bemused."Well," replied my visitor with an insinuating smile, "You appear in it more than once. You don't know it yet, but you're one of your period's major authors."I snatched the book, Mercury, from his hands, and it was even as h...

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson is in some ways the strangest book I’ve read this year.The most surprising aspect of the book is the fact that there is no plot. I’ve read books that have started really slowly, and even books where the author largely ignores plot to focus on building the setting. This book, however, has no plot.For all intents and purposes, Quicksilver is The 17th Century: The Novel. In many ways it feels like the literary equivalent of an open world video game. You just go around...

Stephenson serves up a real doorstop here, and it is the first of three in The Baroque Cycle trilogy to boot! Quicksliver is divided into three discrete but related parts (Quicksilver, King of the Vagabonds and Odalisque) each having its own main protagonist and main characters, but of course lots of overlap. Trying to review a book of this magnitude is difficult, however, especially as Stephenson likes to meander around rather than give the reader a straight forward plot. That stated, here goes...

Book 1 in the Baroque Cycle published 2003.A recommended 4 star read. First thing that needs to be said is this is not a quick read, at 927 pages it’s huge by any standard.The next thing to say is that there is no discernible plot; well none discernible to me that is.So how does one read a 927 page plot less tome?The answer to that, strange at it may seem, is with ease.It reads more like a diary, a diary that records some of the most monumental scientific discoveries of all times. The narrator,

What a difference the right character makes! I was on page 384 when I suddenly realized that Eliza was finally someone in the narrative that I could care about. Because of her, Jack Shaftoe became more interesting too. (If I was a stickler for Nancy Pearl's rule, I would have abandoned the novel long before this point [Take 100, subtract your age and the result is the number of pages you should read before giving up on a book. When you're 100, you're free to judge a book by its cover.]) But I di...

complete reread of the novel (and of course continuing with the sequels) - while I greatly enjoyed it the first time I read the series (in 2008), this time I have appreciated it even more; epic, memorable characters, adventures, intrigue and the birth of the modern world set on the twin pillars of formalized rational inquiry - what we call now science and was once called natural philosophy - and capitalism which forces innovation - which for most history was strongly resisted by societies - by c...

Upon finishing the last page of Quicksilver i really was expecting a gold star; the book is physically massive and ridiculously dense with plot so anyone who finishes deserves an award.As it was split into three separate parts or books, as the author has labelled them, i decided to treat it the same; after each part i took a few days break and read something else. I believe this aided in enjoying Quicksilver. Reading it all in one go would’ve been overkill and possibly sent me insane. Book 1 –...