Microsoft's Reading List
by Daisy Maryles -- Publishers Weekly, 10/6/2003
According to Morrow, its newest bestseller, Quicksilver: Volume One of The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, is "required reading." Its employees and the author's many fans will be very busy over the next 12 months, which will see publication of all three volumes of the 3,000-page trilogy (volume 2, The Confusion, is due in April; volume 3, The System of the World, is scheduled for October). The first book is 944 pages long, and early reviews are good, including a glowing one from Time. National print ads, a 12-city coast-to-coast tour and lots of POP displays are aimed at selling nearly 200,000 copies of the book. The Baroque Cycle is loosely connected to Stephensen's Cryptonomicon, which Morrow reports has sold more than 400,000 hardcover copies worldwide.
