Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #960889 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 960 pages

Customer Reviews

Rewarding reading if you persevere with it
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.

Outstanding!
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.

I'm not sure
Stephenson is probably my favourite author so I waited with bated breath for his latest, Anathem, and have just finished reading it for the first time.

The story is set on a fictional world which is divided in basically 'doers' and 'thinkers'. An event occurs which upsets the whole stability of this world.

It is not as accessible as his other titles, using as it does a fictional language to describe many ordinary things and does not rattle along like many of his other books. There is a large amount of philosophical discussion which can be rather dense, particularly when using the made-up language. I've also a feeling that you'll learn a lot about orbital mechanics while reading it. However, by the end of it, I think I understand what he was talking about. It's also a book you have to sit down and read - not one for reading on the train to work. There is also not as much overt humour as in his previous books.

That said, I am just about to start reading it again and I think it will make a lot more sense this time round (one of the things I like about his books is you can read them again and again and you'll always find things you hadn't noticed or understood previously). The rating may well change then.