by Neal Stephenson
I have given up on this book. It was the last one I was reading for the first reading challenge I\’ve ever done, so I guess I\’ve failed that, too. This was the chunkster of the list. It was a thrilling book to read at first- the language and descriptions are very rich, and each page has to really be savored. But the storyline was incredibly difficult for me to follow. It\’s set in the seventeenth century, and the main character is one Daniel Waterhouse, who works among a soceity of Natural Philosophers, making discoveries astonishing for their time, studying everything with vivid fervor and imagination (which sometimes takes them to grisly places) under the shadow of Isaac Newton. The problem I had was that the book is simply so heavy with gorgeous language it was hard to tell what the heck was going on. It didn\’t help either, that every other chapter jumped a decade or so, so two storylines were going on simultaneously (I always struggle some when a writer does this). I made it through 185 pages and then it just felt so tedious. I guess this kind of historical fiction is just not my thing. It\’s a fantastic piece of writing, and I love the way this author describes things, but I just can\’t follow along and it makes me tired. Too bad. Well, at least I tried. If anyone else has read Quicksilver and has a clearer picture on it, I\’d love to hear what you made of it.
Abandoned 927 pages, 2003
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