Two books arrived from Amazon last week: Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver and Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. I've read the first couple chapters of Quicksilver but it hasn't really grabbed me yet. It seems very dense, there's stuff about puritans, the Salem witch trials, Ben Franklin, Isaac Newton, the Royal Society [?] and a whole whack of other stuff that I'm sure has gone right over my head as I'm not terribly familiar with American history. And that's just the first ~30 pages. Yikes. NS does have a wiki online that provides background essays relating to the QS time period, so that should help. I hope.