It's all a bit mercurial

[andrewducker]

Just finished reading Quicksilver last night, which has led me to spend the following 3 hours reading Neal Stephenson's website, numerous Wikipedia articles on the Glorious Revolution and James II, and annotations from around the web.

I'm somewhat overwhelmed by the huge amounts of detail, and in some ways would have preferred it if he'd just written an entertaining non-fiction book.

Next in the series is The Confusion, which will hopfully make me _less_ confused. But first I have about 5 other books to finish off - including We Need to Talk about Kevin and the second Science of Discworld book.

Comments

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Wait... if you read a book that's part of a series, would it not make sense to read the other books next while it is still fresh in your mind, rather than reading something else?

[andrewducker]

Frankly I need a break from it. I've been frustrated and bored rigid by bits of it, and I could do with something that's more fun.

The bits about Science! and Finance! are great - and Daniel Waterhouse is a great observer of cool stuff, but fairly large chunks did nothing for me.

We Need to Talk about Kevin (which I'm also halfway through) is amazingly good, so I'm looking forward to finishing that.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Bored rigid? You speak lies. Is it the diplomacy? Or the three solid pages of haggling?

Be warned, the next two books pretty much alternate science, finance, diplomacy and war in successive chapters, to great effect.

[andrewducker]

Occasionally the reports of "Person X (who we've never heard of), then does Y, in order to annoy person Z, who we've vaguely heard of, thus causing A, B and C to happen, which causes person C to sneeze loudly, which wakes Someone Important up, causing the invasion of somewhere I've never heard of, under the pretext that {insert more events revolving around people and places who were only introduced half a page ago and don't seem to tie into the plot in any way} get a bit much - but they aren't nearly so bad as large chunks of the Jack Shaftoe Plot, which mostly seem to consist of "And Then Jack had a misadventure based around a fascinating chapter of a history book I was just reading, which doesn't actually have any effect on the plot, but allow me to make references to things I know about and you don't?"

In fact, so far, I could have done without Jack Shaftoe entirely, except for the bits where he introduces Eliza to the plot. This may have something to do with the fact that the Daniel Waterhouse sections largely explain to the reader what's going on, and Eliza also explains the plotics she's involved in, whereas Jack understands nothing, and so neither does the reader (unless already educated about that bit of history).