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46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rewarding reading if you persevere with it, 12 Oct 2008
Anathem was a complete surprise to me. I had deliberately avoided reading anything about the book before I bought it, willing to trust the author to come up with another excellent novel comparable to Snow Crash, The Diamond Age or Cryptonomicon.
After reading the first 50 or 60 pages, I was wondering if I'd wasted my money. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this. The many invented words peppered throughout the text didn't help either - you can immediately decipher many of them from context they're used in, but it is annoying to do it as often as Anathem requires.
However, I kept going, and by the time I'd gotten through the first 100 pages or so I found myself quite enjoying it. After another couple of hundred pages I was reluctant to put it down, and eventually ended up reading the last third of the book in a single session.
What I would say is that once you become familiar with the dialect used by the characters and get past the relatively slow opening chapters, Anathem becomes a far more engaging and interesting book. Sci-fi action sequences are interspersed with frequent philosophical or metaphysical discussions between various characters, which may of course not be to the liking of every reader, but I found it both interesting and entertaining.
Now that I've finished the book I am planning to wait a few weeks and then read it again, as I suspect that reading the opening chapters will be a far better experience the second time around.
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35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding!, 23 Sep 2008
I got the same feeling reading Anathem that I got reading Cryptonomicon - that is, after reading 100 pages, I was thrilled that there were 800 more. It's a ripping yarn peppered with mathematical, mechanical, and linguistic nuggets. There's a little odd vocabulary, but it doesn't take long to get used to, and it's fun to look up terms in the glossary, which is interesting in itself. If you are daunted by the fact that there's a glossary and few appendices, then don't bother. This isn't a book to be idly flicked through. But that's not to say it's difficult or tedious; it's driven by an intricate and enthralling plot, and I found myself completely immersed. Stephenson is a freak of a writer, and this book is wholly impressive.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Should you read it? It depends..., 22 Jun 2009
If you haven't read other Neal Stephenson books, whether you like this or not will depend on your definition of good sci-fi. If you're looking for lasers and warp drives, chances are you'll find this wordy, dull and unpleasantly mediaeval in tone (at least the first two thirds of it). If, like me, you want your sci-fi to challenge your assumptions about the real world by presenting you with a detailed alternative reality, then you'll enjoy it.
The best aspects:
- well thought-out large-scale, long-view alternative 'earth' history
- detailed and evocative picture of a kind of 'science monastery' system (you need to read it to see quite how amazing the realization of this is)
- fascinating overview of the history of science and philosophy, in accessible and often humorous chunks of dialogue
- pretty solid main narrative adventure and coming of age story that keeps you going till the end
The worst aspects:
- slightly cheesy teen romance moments (fortunately only sporadic as the plot separates the protagonists)
- a fairly major lurch into hard SF many-universe-space-adventure towards the end, which takes a bit of getting to grips with
All in all, if you're interested in the ideas and the alternative reality that's portrayed (and its implications for our reality), the weaknesses are easily forgiven. I've reread it a couple of times already and am still enjoying it.
For people who've read everything else Stephenson's written, I'd say this is one of the best. There's always a balance in his writing between elucidating ideas and getting on with telling the story, and I think he gets this right in Anathem and it reads more smoothly than some of the others. (I must confess after the first reading I've always skipped the sections on ancient Summeria in Snow Crash.) It combines the alternative social structures elements that work so well in SC and the Diamond Age with some of the broader sweep of ideas you get in the System of the World.
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