Quicksilver

After letting it sit on my shelf for several months after purchasing it, I have finally gotten into the new Neal Stephenson book Quicksilver. It took me awhile to build up the nerve to really start it… I guess I needed to be ready to commit to the ~950 pages, as well as committing to historical fiction, something which I haven’t had much experience with. But I am about 150 pages into now and enjoying it thoroughly. I think the first 20 pages, which I read between the vast period between buying the book and before this past Monday, were a bit of an uphill climb, but I am up to speed now and each day I look forward to reading a bit more.

My family tells me I began reading at 3 years old, which I gather is pretty early. I have never, ever had trouble reading, but I have never been able to read terribly fast. But for this book, I feel like I have been reading it at a pretty fast clip, at least compared to my usual. Hopefully I am finally training my brain to read faster… I know I cranked through the second half of The Diamond Age (I listened to the first half in Audio Book format). And when I read Pattern Recognition I tore through it pretty fast. I feel like I am ramping up, so hopefully soon I won’t feel like an idiot when my friends read a book in a day that would take me a week or more to read.

That said, I’m not sure what my rush is… I guess to a degree I enjoy reading a book at whatever pace I happen to read it at. Sometimes I am just so into a book that I tear through it obsessively, other times I still enjoy a book but only read so many pages each night…