Your comment about Jack Ketch made me curious whether or not you’ve read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and what you thought of it?

I liked it overall, but I felt that it had the same problems as a lot of Stephenson’s writing – he loves Showing His Research, he’s got a dab hand with dialogue and setpieces, but he lets his plots get away from him and so you get this enormous, titanic buildup and then everything has to get resolved right away, because he’s literally run out of space.