The clock starts on my mark

Something is about to happen that has not happened in a very long time: I'm about to begin reading a book that is not part of Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle. Which is to say that after drinking far more coffee yesterday than was perhaps healthy, I finished that series, meaning 2006 can now officially end, and 2007 may begin. (Only a week late. Not too bad.)

I could probably talk about the Baroque cycle for days. Specifically, I could probably bitch about elements of it for days, and praise other elements of it for an additional number of days. I don't know whether the two numbers would equal each other, because I'm not going there. Bottom line is, I certainly liked the series more than I did the first time I tried to read it, when it was originally published, and I'm glad I gave it another shot. (Everything that follows is informal, incomplete, and unprofessional. You've been warned!)

My bitches about the books mostly deal with style. Broadly speaking, in this series, Stephenson takes the balls-to-the-wall descriptiveness of Cryptonomicon, and re-shapes it into a more studied, stately, paced language, often technical and sometimes dry, and largely heavy, all of which is appropriate considering the era and subject matter he describes (the late 17th and early 18th centuries, mostly focusing on England, with stops throughout Europe and treks across the globe), but not typically as much fun to read. He likes to describe details first and explain the whole later, which is fun when you're in on the joke from the start but can be wearying after too many mildly disorienting occasions. He winks at us often, and hard; nobody should wink that much. He's definitely not writing in a period style, but there are tics and flourishes in there that pay homage to the era. That's not a complaint--nor is it a complaint that there are occasional dazzling or unexpectedly energetic or humorous bits of writing. The complaint is that the text isn't consistently and completely dazzling, humorous, or energetic.

The author of The Greatest Pizza Delivery Sequence in the History of Literature (see: Snow Crash) writing less-energetic language is disappointing, but not a deal breaker. Which I'm glad I discovered this time through, because there's damn good stuff in these books. Jack's wanderings about the world; philosophic discussions between major historical figures and Stephenson's made-up characters; liberal descriptions of ships and things that happen on them; Newton being a huge prick and Leibniz being a rather nice chap, the sort you'd like to have coffee with yourself; Jimmy and Danny the Irish Samurai, who I could not help but picture getting spun-off into their own film series just so the guys who did Boondock Saints could play them on the big screen; the list would go on, if I were a better note taker. I've never been a post-it note user while reading books? But reading this series, I could see just why I should be. I margin-starred plenty of great passages through all three books. Yeah, they're in there. Somewhere.

It's the disconnect between style and substance that seems most troubling to me, when it comes to Stephenson. He's a sort of master of the completely unnecessary info-dump. You can't bitch about him going on and on about whatever he finds interesting because that's his thing--it would be like criticizing Hamlet for thinking too much, or Virginia Madsen for being hot. What bugs me is that it feels like Stephenson so frequently and lengthily mis-steps in presenting that information to the reader, in these books. It's also highly likely that a lot of what he describes in these books, I'm just not as interested in--mea culpa, for every case I haven't remembered to recognize specifically. But plenty of those times it's possible I could have been convinced, were the author trying harder to convince me, that these were fascinating details.

Here's my big praise. Stephenson, through these books, largely succeeded in accomplishing something that rarely if ever happened in any history or literature class I took during my scholastic career: bringing this particular historical era, for me, to life, as being something that happened, something that was important, and something which has ramifications and consequences that are both current and relevant today. I can't comprehend the amount of information Stephenson had to have consumed, processed, and learned well enough to manipulate it into these books. No small feat. Count me among those waiting, with great curiosity, to see what he does next.