Matt Brown's Reviews > Quicksilver

Wow. This may be the longest book I've ever read. According to my Kindle logs I spent 19 hours, 29 mins of reading time on it. Looking back further, it seems Cryptonomicon took me 23 hours, 30 minutes, so Quicksilver is not quite the longest by absolute measure, but it certainly felt like it!

I think the key to enjoying this book is to understand that it's not a typical novel with an introduction, climax and resolution. I wasn't really aware of that fact when I started reading, and therefore the first quarter, even the first half of the book was somewhat wearying as I kept expecting the "story" to start.

Once I came to realise that the book was intended more as an expository tool for teaching European history with a light fictional framework on top it was much easier to get into the book, and by the end I was enjoying the story and the experience. As an educational tool, its success has been limited, I certainly know more about the early foundations of modern London and the founding of the Royal Society than I previously did, but the flurry of people, names and places is simply too much for me to take in at once in a form like this. I found the "Dramatis Personae" at the back of the book after finishing the text, which helped somewhat, but I feel like I really needed a quick cheat sheet version of that next to the book from the start. Minus one point for the Kindle on this score, since the Kindle UI is not really conducive to jumping back and forth to an appendix like that, even if you are aware of its existence.

So four stars in total because I did enjoy the book, and I'm in awe of the skill and detail that must go into creating something of this scale. The injection of real historical characters into the narrative is also a neat touch that adds a bit of spark to the story. I'll certainly press on and read the other books in the cycle, but I'll probably take a break and ingest some less serious books first.