The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson

[essentialsaltes]

I hadn't been enthralled by Quicksilver, so it's taken me another 7 years to get around to The Confusion, which is the 2nd volume in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Again, there was at least a good 200 pages in there; unfortunately, the book is 800 pages long. The first section contains a nice heist, sort of a Shaftoe's 11. But the rest of the book, although it does feature a bit more action than I recall from Quicksilver, drags on, literally and figuratively, to the very ends of the earth. As ever, there are interesting bits here and there, including an interesting (if anachronistic) formulation of Leibniz' monads as computing machines... a kind of prototheory of the universe as cellular automata.

Not a bad book, but not good enough for me to accelerate my schedule. So stay tuned in 2019 for my take on the third and final volume.