While everybody else on the planet is compiling their year-end best-of lists, I'm doing what I continue to do best: whatever I damn well please. And this year, it seems, what seems to have pleased me (among other things, natch) has been the reading of behemoth-sized novels. So I'm leaving 2006 in bigger-and-with-a-banger style, via Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Nearly 3000 pages of geeky historical science-fiction discursive adventure pirate puritan religious social finance commerce story...stuff.
With two weeks to go and me being halfway through the first book? Yeah, don't think I'll make it. But so long as I finish the first book, I'll hit that 75 books goal, the one someone somewhere decided was some sort of magic number for over-achievers and book-nerds like me. (About which other currently bandied about upcoming book challenges, more anon.)
I'll be honest, I tried to get into this series when it was originally published, and failed, rather miserably. Being in general a fan of Stephenson's stuff--you can't not like Snow Crash because it has the best pizza delivery sequence in the history of literature, and Cryptonomicon was great fun, and well, The Diamond Age, I think I've read it twice but I can never remember anything about it, for some reason--it seemed like a certain thing, a trilogy about nerdy things set in the same "universe" as Cryptonomicon. Then I started reading Quicksilver, and made it less than halfway through before I decided there was no plot, no signs of a plot on the horizon, and nothing much else to hold my interest while seeking other reasons to stick with the book. So I put it away and thought for sure I'd never bother again, because, why?
I won't go into the why about why now's a good time for me to try it--said reasons veering rather dangerously toward the personal--but suffice it to say: giving it another shot right now makes sense. And so far, the first book already makes way more sense than it did the first time I tried to read it. Rather than seeming plotless (i.e., motionless) it now appears merely slow-moving. Which is, to me, right now, perfectly acceptable, and to some degree, desirable. I think having heard a little bit more about the latter two books convinces me that there really is a story, here, albeit a very drawn-out, often diverted-from one.
Also, I think it helps that I've noticed this time (and I'm past the point where I quit last time) that the book is often funny. His footnotes jibe well with my desire for what footnotes in literature often ought to do, and Stephenson's heavy-handed winks and nudges at the reader as he displays the ways in which contemporary vernacular find common use in a historical period (Vagabonds acting as a "net-work" upon which "information" is carried, etc.), rather than seeming trite and cheap, now seem rather silly, and therefore, funny. (Is that damning praise?)
There's other things I'm more comfortable with this time through--the baroque social elements of the book, for example, with the emphasis on plots and counter-plots and multiply titled characters, rather than seeming, as it originally did, like a huge hassle that had to be mentally combed through to be kept in order and aligned at every step of the way, now seems, more properly I believe, more like an amusing sort of background, one that any self-respecting geek would rightly lift his chin at, before looking the other way. All of which said, the book still often feels slightly tedious and sloggy, but again, I'm more willing now to give him a pass for it, and to trust that though I might not be as interested in following Stephenson down every path he gets himself geekishly interested in, there's plenty of other aspects of the story that are, now, holding my attention.
So that's why I won't be talking much about other books for another couple weeks. Which means I'll either find other stuff to talk about, or I won't talk about anything at all. I'm not making a call on that one right now.
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