Anathem – Read it

I still haven’t quite gotten through the last of the Baroque Cycle (I’m around page 2000), but I breezed through Anathem‘s 900+ pages in just a few days. Stephenson’s latest novel shows that he is capable of writing an ending, and he even dialed back the rampant exposition a bit. He added a few appendices to address that, but at least it didn’t interrupt the flow. The story of a non-religious “concent” (convent) that is filled with men and women who take themselves out of mainstream society for years to study science and philosophy…well, it’s a bit convoluted, isn’t it? Anyway, it ends up a good adventure involving all sorts of complicated cosmology and cosmogony and philosophy and even a little math and tiling problems. Very cool book. If you enjoyed Cryptonomicon or Snow Crash or any of Stephenson’s earlier novels, get it and read it. If you haven’t read Stephenson, understand that he’s long-winded and this book even includes a couple of extra languages. See below:

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