Anathem by Neal Stephenson Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Anathem
Book Review: A B I T S L O W
Summary: 3 Stars
I think I need to go wash my brain out with Snow Crash now. Anathem starts off slow and then I quit reading it. I think the problem is that when a writer gets successful the editors don't. Edit that is. The words are carved in stone and the resulting books are as heavy as. Look at the Harry Potter books, they just got fatter and fatter. I LOVE all N.S. other novels though so I will give Anthem another shot sometime, but I plan to skim the first 500 pages. If you never hear back from me I didn't make it. DOMO TODO
PS. Abridged edition anyone ?
Book Review: A Book From A Retarded Author
Summary: 3 Stars
Most of us spent at least part of our student days wrestling with Great Ideas, but almost all of us moved on to the prosaic life of paying bills and working at mind numbing jobs until our highest thoughts were about a football game or a cold beer.
The author of this book is retarded in the sense he never moved on. Years after his student days, age-wise, he's still thinking Great Themes. You can garner that from the many four and five star reviews on this site. However, for most of us, this books is just plain Too High -- all the way to inaccessible through incomprehensible.
Other reviews will tell you that if you manage to wade through 300 or so pages of gibberish, you'll finally get to an exciting and stimulating story. Having read this author's other works, I believe them entirely. I'm just not up to the job of reading sentences such as, "He rode his ieueu into the owiskslsl finding aksieyh had, after kadlasi settled, found much uuuaksl to aeuel". Presumably, had I been able to stay awake for those 300 pages, eventually that sentence would have made sense to me and I'd be off and reading in style. If that sort of sentence was isolated, well, that's ok with me, but that is the entire book.
I am rating 3 stars because I believe the others who read and managed to decipher this tome, but I need to warn those who may have day jobs - watch out. This book is quite heavy and it'll give you a nasty set of bruises falling on you after you fall asleep due to reading a paragraph or two.
Book Review: A Brillant Writer's Unchecked Ego Creates a Boring Mess
Summary: 1 Stars
I am a big Stephenson fan. Having mucked my way through the first 200 pages of "Quicksilver" before The Baroque Cycle story took off and I was richly rewarded for my patience, I can honestly say having forced myself to grind through the first 200 pages of "Anathem", I am tapping out of this free lance, creative mess. Reading a new language and definitions created by Stephenson was just too much for me. The story is flat out boring with pages and pages of conversation in a language and world I could care less about.
My time is too precious to wade through a brillant writer's unchecked ego looking for a worthy story reading words that appeared to have been made up after Stephenson spilled a Scrabble game board on the floor. Some of the sentences would have made Dr. Suess proud. I will gladly wait a few more years for his next book hoping Stephenson gets out of his system whatever drove him to try his hand writing this story and he gets back to being a serious, respected writer using a language actually spoken on our planet today....now there's a novel idea.
Book Review: A Casual Nerd's Review
Summary: 4 Stars
It's a little hard for me to objectively review Anathem. I'm all googly over Neal Stephenson and have waited a painful eternity for this book. Which I like and recommend, by the way. This book has exciting ideas, an engaging world concept, passably sympathetic protagonist and fun new words. It also has more protracted and less well concealed nerdly digressions into hard math and science concepts than previous offerings. I find it a bit discourteous to the casual nerd reader (myself) who isn't prepared to abandon the story fo 40 or 50 pages at a time while something technical and esoteric is pursued, thinly disguised as (endless) dinner conversaion. Nevertheless: 4 solid stars for a good yarn by my favorite author. Happy reading!Book Review: A Great Author's Attempt at Mediocrity
Summary: 2 Stars
Having read each and every one of Neal Stephenson's books, I pre-ordered this one the moment it became available. I've been an avid fan of this genre for over 40 years and look forward to each new work from the handful of authors that can actually write superlative prose with an engaging plot. Mr. Stephenson was certainly one of those. Until now. Anathem was disappointing in it's meandering philosophy, poorly developed plot and slightly more than cardboard-thin characters. I was reminded of a somewhat mediocre version of Robert Heinlein's works, which I read as a kid. No author can create great works, every time. Hopefully this is the low point of his career and we can expect a more well written piece next time.