Wasn't I Just Saying This?
Neal Stephenson has just released Quicksilver, his latest doorstop (this time following the example of Pychon's Mason & Dixon into historical tales from colonial times), and the reviews are in:
Stephenson clearly did a great deal of research for this book, and he seems reluctant to let a crumb of it go to waste... [He] bundles much of his research into conversations, packing his characters' mouths with favorite details, such as the derivation of the words "guinea," "dollar" and "sabotage." Much of the dialogue is painfully clunky. His characters tend to inform one another of facts they probably already knew but readers don't, and every few pages somebody spouts a philosophical treatise.
...the novel is so swollen and overloaded that these delightful Stephensonian offerings are hard to follow--and even hard to identify. And Quicksilver suffers from a problem common in parts of trilogies: it feels unresolved. Will it turn out to be the first third of a carefully constructed meta-novel, or a messy chunk of a bigger mess?
Doesn't that sound like 900 pages of the sublime?
7:55:24 AM 
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