"Quicksilver"

Well, I finally finished it - which is just as well, as the fruits of my latest Amazon trip arrived this week. I don't think I'm going to give a full review; after all, it is the first book of a trilogy, and I suspect I'm not going to understand it fully until I've read the whole thing. I will offer a couple of comments, though.

I get the impression that there's been quite a bit of discussion of the book's anachronisms - mostly, anachronisms of vocabulary - in the fannish community. I noticed a few myself; for example, I know (courtesy of that history of statistics I read last year) that the word "statistician" had not been coined at the time in which the novel is set. They're a little jarring, but I have to assume that Stephenson inserted them deliberately. I'm not entirely sure why; I'll have to think about that. That concern registered, I will admit that I was amused by one of them: The noun "shop" had been verbed; people went "shopping" now. Self-referentiality, anyone?

I occasionally indulge in the very bad habit of glancing at the end of a book before actually reaching it. It never works out. In this case, I completely misinterpreted the final scene on first (pre)reading; I had just passed some of the scenes of Hooke's experiments on dogs, and leaped to a horrifying (and completely irrational) conclusion. It wasn't until about a hundred pages from the end, when Daniel's medical troubles were revealed, that I realized my mistake.

I'm looking forward to reading the next book. Meanwhile, I've started in on Gaiman's Worlds' End (Sandman, book 8).