The Baroque Cycle

While visiting my family in AZ, I had the quietude to finally finish reading The Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson's eight-book, three volume massive chunk of fiction, just in time for the year to draw to an end.

If I tried describing these things, I'd get real hyperbolic real fast, so I'll keep it simple and just say this is one of the best things I've ever read. There is no way I can recommend this series too highly.

That said, this isn't a quick read. The volumes are not only long, but dense. Stephenson is an extremely intelligent guy who does enormous amounts of research and puts it all on the page. The plotting is intricate, and the dialogue is spoken by smart people who like wordplay and spend time discussing finance, politics, religion and science in detail. There were times my brain was too tired for me to get traction on the page, and I just had to go to bed.

At the same time... man, there are several chapters that I re-read and re-re-read, not just entertained, but awed by the writing. (Jack's escape from India in The Confusion floored me). It's a prix fixe literary meal.

In the same way that I spent most of 2008 working my way through Oblivion and then Fallout 3, The Baroque Cycle swallowed up a vast chunk of this past year's reading time. Definitely worth it on all counts, but I found they were less entertainments than mighty tasks. For a while, I'm gonna need to focus on shorter/quicker/lighter titles when it comes to books and video games. To that end, I'm playing Fable II and reading some Bukowski.