Lead me not....

Help! I'm being tempted!

(Permalinks apparently don't work over there -- scroll down to the post about Quicksilver and The Confusion.)

Macon, whom I have encountered via Mr. Meade (and in this specific case, in comments to this post of Sean's), is trying to tempt Sean and I into reading Neal Stephenson's latest two novels (comprising the first two installments of The Baroque Cycle, which is -- I think -- a trilogy with one more volume to come).

I don't really need to be "tempted" here, per se. Reading Quicksilver is something I definitely plan to do, sometime in the next six months, I hope. The sticking point for now is that I want to be able to really clear the decks of other reading projects first, including some material I have that is for review. But Macon's post definitely makes me want to bump the book up in the rotation.

In any event, I want to see if Stephenson has managed to squash his old bugaboo, the "99/100 of a good book, with a crappy ending" phenomenon that has afflicted him in the past. (I actually didn't think that Cryptonomicon's ending was all that bad, but man, does Snow Crash ever just go wham against a brick wall on its last page.)