Quicksilver
This passage, from Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, just blew me away:
When he and Hooke and Wilkins had cut open live dogs during the Plague Years, Daniel had looked into their straining brown eyes and tried to fathom what was going in their minds. He’d decided that nothing was, that dogs had no conscious minds, no thoughts of past or future, living purely in the moment, and that thus it was worse for them. Because they could neither look forward to the end of the pain, nor remember times when they had chased rabbits across meadows.
Quicksilver did a lot of blowing-me-away, actually. Yes, it’s ridiculously long, pathologically digressive, endlessly peripatetic (both literally and thematically), and, quite often, absolutely exhausting. Reading it sometimes felt like being beaten about the head and shoulders with velvet nunchucks made of raw awesome.
But it’s also completely worth it. This book contains worlds. Passages like the one above live alongside stretches of fantastic prose, hilarious dialog, long (unboring!) disquisitions on alchemy/monetary policy/physics/pirates, quirky, genuinely likable characters, and lovingly re-imagined historical figures doing fascinating and more or less historically accurate things.
I wish I could go back and read it for the first time again.
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