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.