Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle #1)
by Neal Stephenson
I woke up early on Sunday and finally finished it. Hallelujah.
I happened to start reading this around the same time I started listening to the Revolutions podcast series on the English Revolution (-ish... thing.... whatever the hell it was), so I had two sources on approximately the same time period going at the same time. This helped, but I still don't remember all the goddamn names, much less the titles and what they did and what they believed and who they supported and why.
Quicksilver seems exhaustively researched, but apparently a lot of it is also made up out of whole cloth. Confusing as hell. I can't remember if Stephenson's vocabulary is usually this out of control, but if anything the historical setting exacerbates this tendency. If I hadn't been reading it as an ebook I would have glossed over it; instead, I looked up a word every few pages and got a thorough vocabulary lesson on archaic words I will never use because I'm not that much of an asshole.
Being somewhat constrained by actual history keeps the plot from reaching Stephenson's usual extreme screwball ending. But then again, this is the first of three. (Someone told me recently that it was originally written as nine books, then combined. Augh.) If I do go on to the second one, it's only going to be after a long recovery period.
Update, June 2017: It's been 3.5 years since I read this book and I have no good memories of it. (When I do recall something about it, it's generally the sheep's intestine condom scene. Only-female-character (forgot her name) was such a Cool Girl.) There is absolutely no way I'm reading another 1,723 pages of this.