The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson
Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest are usually accounted long books, each logging in at 1000 plus pages, as well as erudite literary works. Just for comparison, Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle at 2685 pages is longer than GR and IJ combined. The Baroque Cycle is published as three books, but it is really one long novel. I don’t want to make a pretense of being any literary scholar, so I want to confess right up front that despite reading the whole thing, including all 300 plus endnotes, I found IJ occasionally compelling but frequently tedious and rarely funny. More grievously, I did not recognize GR as one of the greatest novels of all time, though it too had its compelling moments. I’m afraid that I found the description of the V2 and its place of manufacture more interesting than most of the characters. The BC lacks the high literary seriousness of these other works, being at heart a swashbuckling tale embedded in an elaborately mi...