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Quicksilver

Neal Stephenson:

The following is from John Harrison (223649) on Slashdot:

Neal's books don't end. They accelerate. Allow me to explain. Snowcrash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon all begin with very detailed explainations of the technology that the plot hinges on. Stephenson is actually pretty good at making this interesting, and he puts plenty of plot in while he does it.

Once the tech is explained the story starts to move faster. It is as if the story is passing through Stephenson's mind faster and he isn't able to type fast enough to keep up. So as it accelerates the details that make it to the page are more and more sparse until there are no details or explainations left. That is when the book is over, since there is nothing to print on the next page as the pace of the book approaches infinity and he simply can type anything.

Quicksilver seems to break the mold. It doesn't get faster and in fact just gets harder and harder to read. The pace at which I could read it got slower and slower until I was unable to read any more of it. I stopped (well, the velocity of my reading reached zero) about 300 pages from the end. This from a person that read Cryptonomicon in two sittings.