Query

Should I hunker down and read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle? Given my interests, it sounds like the sort of thing I probably ought to read--but that's not quite the same thing as saying that it's the sort of thing I probably want to read.  As longterm visitors to this blog know, length is no object; prose style, however, certainly is, and reports on same from around the blogosphere strike me as...dissuasive.  But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.  I suppose it can hardly be worse than C. M. Katherine Phipps' The Sword of De Bardwell: "'My father's brother!' cried the agitated girl; 'is it possible? My uncle Henry, whose kindness to me as a child I so well remember; is it possible? Oh, Master Bardwell, you would not surely trifle with me upon such a subject.  But my uncle, and--a heretic!'" (71)