re: #353 Walter L. Newton

I have never had so much fun with a piece of historical fiction before. Really, the narrative was so clever, it kept me going back and forth between references to either discover more information about something, or to find out if Stephenson was being “creative.”

As I said up thread, some of the actual facts were stranger than his created fictional history.

One caution, his writing style is also baroque, very freeform, so one moment you are reading a 30 page letter from one character to another and then the next minute you are reading a play script on some topic… and there are times when he can go on for painful pages just describing a walk across a courtyard.

But, he hides so many gems inside everything that you just plod on, even through some of the more self indulgent passages.

I’m a big fan of Baroque style. Did you ever read John Barth’s “The Sot-Weed Factor”? Takes place largely in colonial Maryland.