[Sot weed=tobacco, Factor=a seller or merchant] This is a book about a poet. Ebenezer Cooke is born in the late 1600's with a twin sister Anna. The twins are very close while growing up. A tutor has been employed to teach them and he's opened their minds up to history, philosophy and a love of learning. The effect on Eben is to put him on some kind of elevated plane where he has trouble dealing with the less than innocent state of the world.
In his late 20's Eben becomes ensnared in a wager where a group of friends are trying to outbid each other for the favors of a prostitue with whom they are friends. In a fit of anxiety he makes the highest bid but when it comes time to collect his noble feelings about his own virginity makes him decline. This sets in motion a set of events where he puts his own spiritual state on a pedastal and becomes banished to Maryland to his father's estate. Before he leaves he blusters his way into becoming poet laureate of that colony even though he's never written any verse.
The book is filled with mistaken identity, chance timing and more bawdiness than you can shake an unused stick at. It's got pirates and indians. Opium and drunkeness. False marriages and fraudulent contracts. It'd make a great mini-series.
I enjoyed it but it was long. My copy was 800 pages but it read more like 1600. More dialect but I find this period's speech to be easy to decipher. I'm glad to have read it.
Stephenson's Baroque Cycle books fall in about this same date range and locations. I enjoyed them more overall. Neither are very dense but they are an investment of time.
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