Sophie here! The book has been read, thoroughly defaced and sent on to South Africa, where I am confident it will at some point become dusty and get pissed on by a lion.
I got the book, as Raye said, in the middle of a schoolwork overload, so most of the reading I did was on the train. You can tell by the sometimes shaky handwriting, especially when I went over the badly-maintained tracks past Otahuhu. I'd never noticed all those damn bumps before. Anyway, sorry about that, I guess.
Mine is the green highlighter and green pen. Raye's is the blue highlighter and black pen. My notations tended to follow and/or answer Raye's, and I didn't try too hard with the snark. I'm a little sorry now, since expectations there seem to be high and I wasted a chunk of my allotted snark-space carefully writing proper curse-words over the author's coy replacements. But the book wasn't bad enough to warrant massive mockery, nor did I like it enough to bring forth the squee.
The lack of understanding of the pace of scientific discovery in that century irritated me until the Afterward, when the author was like, "I know." At which point my irritation morphed to disgust. You can't just handwave sloppy history/science you've just based a entire book on. You just can't, it offends me. If you are going to commit to an historical AU (which steampunk is) then you should really commit to it.
It might not have annoyed me so much if the supposed genius behind the Darwinist creations hadn't been the actual Darwin. He didn't know shit about DNA, and giving him the credit rings hella hollow and like the author thinks the reader is stupid enough to go "Durr, Darwin = evolution = lifey sciencey = DNA, okay." Also, Darwin's theory of evolution was intimately tied up with his life, but Leviathan's author makes no mention of what could have changed about the man's life to make him go from looking at orchids and bees and going, "Dude! They're fucking!" to "Let's make an orchid-bee hybrid that shoots lasers, because I can definitely do that".
All that said, I couldn't help thinking as I read (and I can't remember if I wrote this in the actual book or not) that it would make a great Studio Ghibli film.
Looking forward to your thoughts, cats and kittens.
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