Just to bookend the passport story, it should be noted that no one made any comments about my passport on the way back in. When I got to the customs person, I dropped the passport on his counter and said “It’s been washed” before he could do the dead fish routine. He just laughed, stamped my customs form and said “welcome back!”
So, ain’t nothin’ all bad. Not even customs.
I’m sadly nearing the end of reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1). It makes me somewhat sad to near the end of a great book, but I am heartened by the fact that there are two more volumes to come, and I saw The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2) in a bookstore display window in the airport last night.
While Cyptonomicon still tops the list of my all-time favorite books, Quicksilver is humbling in its breathtaking richness of detail, history and compelling storyline and characters. Every so often I have to set the book down and marvel at the amount of research that must have gone into this rather large tome.
I wonder if it is harder to create an entire world filled with rich history (say, The Lord of the Rings) or to meticulously research the real world and weave a fascinating story into it.
It is not so very often that I am reading an action sequence in a book and I am actually overcome with a rush of adrenaline, especially if I am sitting in a cramped airplane seat next to someone who is large enough to have justifiably purchased two seats, but didn’t. Such was the case when I read a sand-sailer action sequence. A sand-sailer (and I hadn’t heard of it) is basically a large skateboard with a sail on it, which is used on beaches. In the novel, William of Orange rides one every morning, and there’s a great sequence with horses, sand-sailers, pirates, muskets and stuff. Woo. I was thinking it would be worth making the book into a movie, if just for that sequence.
Woo.