From Neal Stephenson’s System of the World concludes the Baroque Trilogy [Boing Boing Blog]:

For all that, these books are like a good curry. They’re mild and interesting when you first taste them, but after you’ve swallowed, they grow on you, spreading a warm fire throughout your digestive system, making beads of sweat appear on your forehead. Since finishing the first two books, I’ve been practically haunted by them. Ever time I spend money, or walk through London, or see a ship, or think about math and science, some snippet of those books springs to mind, a lens through which to reexamine my thinking and assumptions.

The System of the World is no less moving: even as I drew toward the conclusion, it was already working at me, making me think hard about the world around me. Though reading these books was, at times, a chore, it was a chore that paid off handsomely.

I mentioned a while ago that I was reading Quicksilver. I am now well on my way of finishing The Confusion and I can concur with Cory’s analysis. The Baroque Cycle is dense and it requires its readers to embrace its world to fully enjoy it. It’s not the kind of book that you can read on and off, read a couple of pages, then forget about it for a while and pick it up again without any problem. The story lines and characters are complex and I found it difficult, each time I stopped reading it for a week or so, to dive back in without devoting a couple of hours to re-acquainting myself with the book. It’s been an uphill battle for me since I don’t always have that kind of time. And obviously, it becomes harder proportionally to the time spent without reading since I know switching my mental context back to that baroque world is going to be pretty involved. I’m not giving up though but I wish I could read the book more continuously so that I could read it faster by limiting the need for re-immersion! :)

Somebody Told Me from the album Hot Fuss by The Killers

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.