Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. The mammoth brick of a book that has occupied the vast majority of my reading time for the past month. It's not that the book is dull, or a hard slog, or anything like that-- in fact, it's a compellingly readable book. It's just long-- better than nine hundred pages-- which makes it a slow read, no matter how enjoyable the story. (It's also not the sort of book that lends itself to reading in five-minute chunks, between interruptions by a needy dog...)

The scary part is, it's actually only the first third of a whopping huge novel. It cuts off in mid-plot (mid-flashback, even), and two more books of similar size are expected to follow. 2003-4 is going to be a bit short on the booklog count, I think...

I've thought a lot about what to say when booklogging this, and it's really hard to come up with anything sensible. The plot is too complicated to describe, and anyway serves mostly as an excuse for Stephenson to show off both his extensive research and his flair for writing slightly overheated prose. Probably the most valuable service I can provide to prospective readers of the book, then, is to post an extended excerpt from the book. Thus, the following passage, describing Daniel Waterhouse's life with his arch-Puritan, former pamphleteer father, in London during the plague year of 1666:

The goal of all persons who had houses in those days was to possess the smallest number of pieces of furniture needed to sustain life, but to make them as large and heavy and dark as possible. Accordingly, Daniel and Drake ate their potatoes and herring on a table that had the size and weight of a medieval drawbridge. There was no other furniture in the room, although the eight-foot-high grandfather clock in the adjoining hall contributed a sort of immediate presence with the heaving to and fro of its cannonball-sized pendulum, which made the entire house lean from one side to the other like a drunk out for a brisk walk, and the palpable grinding of its gear-train, and the wild clamorous bonging that exploded from it at intervals that seemed suspiciously random, and that caused flocks of migrating waterfowl, thousands of feet overhead, to collide with each other in panic and veer into new courses. The fur of dust beginning to overhang its Gothick battlements; its internal supply of mouse-turds; the Roman numerals carven into the back by its maker; and its complete inability to tell time, all marked it as pre-Huygens technology. Its bonging would've tried Daniel's patience even if it had occurred precisely on the hour, half-hour, quarter-hour, et cetera, for it never failed to make him jump out of his skin. That it conveyed no information whatever as to what the time actually was, drove Daniel into such transports of annoyance that he had begun to entertain a phant'sy of standing at the intersection of two corridors and handing Drake, every time he passes by, a libel denouncing the ancient Clock, and demanding its wayward pendulum be stilled, and that it be replaced with a new Huygens model. But Drake has already told him to shut up about the clock, and so there was nothing he could do.