Sue recommended Paradise Alley to me, so I've started working on it. The book is thick enough to serve as a handy doorstop, or to knock an unwary pedestrian severely unconscious. It's taking me a while to get into: all those descriptive passages for mere minutes of a character's time! It takes place in New York City against the backdrop of the Civil War, while the draft is being enacted and plenty of Irish-Americans are unhappy with it. I must be hundred or so pages in, and it's still morning of day one, in the dead silence that comes before a mob outbreak. Rather unnerving.