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…

7 thoughts on “Quicksilver

    1. Hmmm…. I never really thought to analyze that much… I’ll keep an eye out for it.

      BTW, I guess we missed each other over T-day. You’re going to hawaii for xmas, eh? That sucks (for me. :P)

      1. Yeah, my mini-vacation went faster than I had expected, and I was transportation-less through most of it. You’ll just have to find a way to come visit out here. =)

        1. Hehehehe, I’d love to, trust me, but something tells me that I will have to find a job (and therefore some money) before I am able to make any trips like that =)

    1. You mean cryptonomicon? If so, then yes, I read it… But it took me years to finish. I started reading it at RIT, and constantly got distracted by classes, et. al. Then when I graduated I didn’t pick it up for awhile, but finally did and would read a few hundred pages and then get distracted by something IRL. Finally I made it through the rest of it a year or two ago.

      What’s funny is that this book was kind of a logjam, once I finished that book I shredded through a bunch of books that had “backed up” behind it.

      1. haha fn a. Too much army of darkness recently.

        I dunno i went through it quick, i was in this phase where i was all into U-boats/enigma. I think i watched Engima, U571, 2 discovery channel shows, 6 hours of Das Boot, and read Cryptonomicon over the course of like 2 months.

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