Anathem

[neonelephant]

I finished Anathem over the weekend. It has been a long time since I've been up past sunrise doing anything, much less finishing a book. Needless to say, I enjoyed it a great deal, although there are 150ish pages in the middle that drag a bit.

Like Snow Crash and The Big U (and, I suppose, Interface, although my memories of that are hazy), it is

Comments

[toddler_hiway]

Just finished it. My take:

The talky bits: A++ would read again. I was a little bit astounded and more than a little excited to see the early 20th c. phenomenologists show up in Stephenson, of all places -- though I was hoping that the annoying insistence on the Terran's Frenchness coupled with his devotion to Husserl was going to be foreshadowing for a discussion of Merleau-Ponty.

The Adventure bits: I felt like all the painstaking description of the details involved in pushing things across an ice continent, or around in space, or blah blah blah was put in there specifically to make me feel like a Cartesian dualist or something. No, Neal, I do not care about the clever ways that your characters get things from one place to another, please go back to having them make quantum theories of consciousness seem less silly. I have an inexplicable tolerance for Adventure when it involves Shaftoes and Waterhouses. That tolerance, apparently, does not extend to Raz, Jesry, and Cord. Less stuff more talk!

One short passage made me wonder if Stephenson reads Metafilter, because, uh, thanks to an old ask.mefi question the bit where Raz tells one of the suurs what Terran food tastes like seemed to me like a scene that had (incompossibly) wandered in from another type of book altogether.

[neonelephant]

The ice bits (and some of the stuff leading up to that) were the only bits that really dragged for me, although I agree that the conversations were the highlight of the book.