A minor milestone in leisurely reading

Last night I finally finished Neil Stephenson's Quicksilver. Oh, don't

get me wrong, I've read it, and the full trilogy, before, but for much

of the past year I have been re-reading it aloud to my girlfriend. She

has an eye strain which means that if she reads too much at night she

gets headaches, and so I've been doing the recreational reading for

the two of us over the past year. We started out with Quicksilver, and

made steady but slow progress through it. There have been some breaks,

a small diversion through the worlds of Philip Pullman, a frantic dash

through the last Harry Potter, but quicksilver has been the constant

through the journey, a stable rock against which we could navigate.

There have been patches which have been hard to read out loud, many

sections of the book include deep philosophical discourse between

multiple characters, and when reading making clear who was saying what

was at times a bit of a challenge, but we finally got to the last page

just before midnight last night. Now just The Confusion, The System of

the World and The Cryptonomicon left to get through!

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