Excellence in reviewing

If you are a fan of book reviews that manage to be discursive, while still communicating the strengths and weaknesses of the book under investigation, then you must read John Derbyshire's extensive review of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Derbyshire's prose is worthy of reading in and of itself.

Although a minor detail, I appreciate that Derbyshire provides a metric for deciding whether or not to read the nearly 3000 page epic.

A novel stands or falls by the pleasure it gives to the thoughtful and attentive reader. By that standard, and setting aside the minor blemishes noted above, the Baroque Cycle is a very fine work of popular fiction. The more you know about math, logic, and computing, the more you will find in it; but any reader who, at a bare minimum, does not mind mathematical and technological topics will find something. If you have been wondering whether you should tackle Neal Stephenson’s three big volumes, I urge you to do so.