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4.0/4.0

It's the Moby-Dick question.

The plot's about an angry guy chasing a whale. There's not a lot of variation on this theme: he catches it, or he doesn't. Maybe he catches it and wishes that he didn't, maybe he doesn't and regrets that he failed. But this basic plot, a straightforward quest for revenge, is such thin gruel that you'd have to be on the lower end of the intellectual spectrum to fail to realize that the book's about something a little bit more than hunting a big fish.

Even so, there's no guarantee that you're going to tolerate 20 pages about rope. At the end of the digression, you're either going to respond in one of two ways. You might be of the sort to go, "Hmm, that was some fascinating rope discourse. I had no idea that rope could be used in such multifaceted ways, and having read that, I am now a different and slightly more rounded person." Then again, you could respond with a "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, enough with the stupid rope already! For fuck's sake, where's that son of a bitch whale? The white sea mammal is the TITLE of the book, and I'm reading about some shitty rope?! Christ, I need some vodka."

You should know what sort of reader you are before picking this book up, because The Baroque Cycle is about 3,000 pages long, and Neal Stephenson digresses like an ADHD kid on speed. Melville's focus is a goddamn space laser in comparison. Quicksilver has economics, mining, mathematics, piracy, slavery, early Puritan philosophy and I forget what else.

It is genius, pure and simple.

This is one of the first great works of the 21st century, and I can't recommend it highly enough. But odds are great that you'll hate it mightily if your concern is the destination instead of how you get there.