A little over two years ago (over Thanksgiving of 2004 I think), I began reading The Baroque Cycle, a series of three novels by Neal Stephenson.  In all, they total out at around three thousand pages.  Last night I finally finished the third and final book.  I’m not sure if I’m just a slow reader or if the books needed to have a lot of useless information taken out or if I just don’t allocate enough of my time to the task of reading.  Probably all of the above.

Part of the slowness is a result of the reading level, which is on par with The Lord Of The Rings, which I spent about a year and a half on (I think I spent a semester or summer on each book, including The Hobbit).  Both were filled with long, descriptive passages where you read five or six pages before anything actually happens.  Which isn’t to say that I disliked either set of books.  But sometimes I would get tired of them and put them down for a month before picking them back up.  Now I’m just looking forward to being able to read other things that are hopefully a little faster in pace.  Next up is The Chronic[what!]cles of Narnia, which shouldn’t take me nearly so long.  We got a single-volume copy of the whole set for Christmas last year, but I haven’t had a chance to read it.

That metals consisted partly of water was obvious from the fact that, when you heated them up, they became fluids.  But some other substance must be combined with water in order to create a metal.  The missing ingredient was supplied by invisible rays from the planets, which penetrated the ground and combined with the water that was there in the earth.  The rays from that dimmest and most sluggish of planets, Saturn, created the basest of all metals, lead.  Jupiter was responsible for tin and Mars for iron.  Venus did copper, the moon silver, Mercury, obviously, accounted for mercury, and the Sun made gold.  This was why the gold-hungry Spaniards, in their explorations and conquests, had never strayed far from the Equator, for that was where the Sun beat down most directly, and produced the richest posits of its precious Element.