David Woodger
Kajsa (age 7) asked me what this book was about when I was more than 200 pages in and I couldn't really come up with a satisfying answer for her. I got 264 pages into this huge book before giving up. That was far too many pages than it deserved. Not much of anything happened in that first quarter of the book.
Then I started checking out what some GoodReads members said of the book. It's rated greater than 4 of 5 stars by the 12,000+ readers who have read/attempted it. Lots of Stephenson fans out there. I, too, am a big fan of Snow Crash, and Cryptonomicon even more so. This book is not like those books. And, since I had decided to abandon this, I checked out some reviews with spoilers. None of those did much to make the book any sexier, either.
In Anathem we have a far-future Earth-like planet called Arbre, where scientists, philosophers and mathematicians live like monks, closed off from the rest of the secular world. One such monk, 19-year-old Erasmus, narrates the story but “story” is a bit of a stretch. First of all, there's a maddening glossary of terms that you constantly have to check to figure out what the hell a character is talking about. Second of all, there's just lots of talking about arcane bits of science, math, etc, all of which does nothing to move the story toward any direction that is evident at this point. There's more than that but, who cares? It's really terribly dull. So screw that.
Kajsa (age 7) asked me what this book was about when I was more than 200 pages in and I couldn't really come up with a satisfying answer for her. I got 264 pages into this huge book before giving up. That was far too many pages than it deserved. Not much of anything happened in that first quarter of the book.
Then I started checking out what some GoodReads members said of the book. It's rated greater than 4 of 5 stars by the 12,000+ readers who have read/attempted it. Lots of Stephenson fans out there. I, too, am a big fan of Snow Crash, and Cryptonomicon even more so. This book is not like those books. And, since I had decided to abandon this, I checked out some reviews with spoilers. None of those did much to make the book any sexier, either.
In Anathem we have a far-future Earth-like planet called Arbre, where scientists, philosophers and mathematicians live like monks, closed off from the rest of the secular world. One such monk, 19-year-old Erasmus, narrates the story but “story” is a bit of a stretch. First of all, there's a maddening glossary of terms that you constantly have to check to figure out what the hell a character is talking about. Second of all, there's just lots of talking about arcane bits of science, math, etc, all of which does nothing to move the story toward any direction that is evident at this point. There's more than that but, who cares? It's really terribly dull. So screw that.