  Thoughts on Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson:  It's not about anything so much as it's about entirely everything.  For example:  On men's fashion,  circa 1670:  Today,
 walking across Charing Cross,  he was wearing a suit that appeared to've been constructed by ( 1)  dressing him in a blouse with twenty- foot- long sleeves of the most expensive linen;
 ( 2)  bunching the sleeves up in numerous overlapping gathers on his arms;  ( 3)  painting most of him in glue;
 ( 4)  shaking and rolling him in a bin containing thousands of black silk doilies;  and ( 5)  (
because King Charles II,  who'd mandated,  a few years earlier,  that all courtiers wear black and white,  was getting bored with it,  but had not formally rescinded the order)
 adding dashes of color here and there,  primarily in the form of clusters of elaborately gathered and knotted ribbons-  enough ribbon,  all told,  to stretch all the way to whatever shop in Paris where the Earl had bought all of this stuff.  The Earl also had a white silk scarf tied round his throat in such a way as to show of its lacy ends.
 Louis XIV's Croatian mercenaries,  Les Cravates ,  had made a practice of tying their giant,  flapping lace collars down so that gusts of wind would not blow them up over their faces in the middle of a battle or duel,  and this had become a fashion in Paris,  and the Earl of Upnor,
 always pushing the envelope,  was now doing the cravate thing with a scarf instead of an ( as of ten minutes ago)  outmoded collar.  [ page 179]
 Just for starters.  You're either bored to tears or hooked like a crack monkey.  Lacking any sugar in my diet for 72 hours now,  I'm tweaking on anything I can find and spent about 40 minutes this afternoon reading and re- reading this passage,  which goes on for about another page,
 by the way.  Over and over like a worry stone.  I stopped short of qabalistically rearranging all the letters in the proper nouns,  but not that much short.  On Saturday I'll be officially de- toxed and will get to eat chocolate again.
 It's good to have things to look forward to.
