All reviews of Anathem

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  Easy to appreciate, hard to enjoy

  by Bob Milne

  16 months ago

  Anathem represents my second encounter with the genius of Neal Stephenson (third, if you count my aborted read of Quicksilver), and I can honestly say that while the reading experience does not get any easier, there is the same sense of satisfaction waiting at the end. More dense, less accessible, and somehow not as interesting as Cryptonomicon, it's a book that almost violently defies categorization. I find it a really difficult book to review. The university-educated, critical reading, spectacle-wearing intellectual who lies deep within me wants to award it five stars for its sheer audacity, limitless depths of esoteric concepts, and laudable efforts to make math interesting. It really is a book to be admired as much for what it sets out to accomplish as for the skill behind it. However, the tired, overworked, long-haired geek in search of entertainment who resides a bit closer to my surface is struggling to award it any more than two stars for the brief, fitful glimpses of story hidden between the concepts. There's a really exciting novella buried here, but it would take an entire concent another millennium to unearth it. More than anything else, I guess my problem is its all just so boring. Plot developments are so few and far between, it feels like the story never moves ahead. There's a lot of talking, a lot of thinking, a lot of writing, and a lot of calculating going on that, quite honestly, I would have been content to have seen left off the page. Yes, it's interesting and, yes, I can honestly say I learned a few things, but they were hard lessons. By the times the aliens actually appear, I'd honestly forgotten that there were aliens in the book, and by the time we get to the revelations about Fraa Erasmas . . . well, I'd stopped caring. It took me nearly a year of on again/off again reading to get through it, and it was more a sense of obligation that kept dragging me back than any real desire to get back into the story. The book never really grabbed my attention, and simply didn't offer my any incentive to keep reading. I feel bad, because there's a nagging voice in the back of my head that keeps telling me I should appreciate it more, but appreciation is not the same as enjoyment, and therein lies the rub.

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  Excellent!

  by futz

  3 years ago

  Excellent book from an excellent author! Enjoyed it thoroughly, and will read it again. I find it hard to understand the reviews I read here which seem to be written by simpletons. The book is not complex at all. Just a really interesting story, well told.

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  Challenging & Rewarding read

  by William Auger

  3 years ago

  Even for someone who reads many SF novels the first 100 pages are hard to get through (think of a prison/monastery setting where they study math & philosophy). If you can persevere, the layers of complexity unfold into a page turning read. If you enjoy complex SF you will be sorry to find yourself on the last page with no more to read.

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  I tried...

  by Forgotten Realms Queen

  4 years ago

  I tried to read and enjoy this book, but I gave up after two chapters. I have no doubt that it is an excellent fantasy read, but the language that was used simply confused me. I could not follow it at all...

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  Most satisfying read I have ever had

  by Brian Rice

  4 years ago

  This is an incredibly complicated book, where the plot is basically used to move from one lecture about phylisophy/science to another. What I am finding so interesting is that in the depth of these incredibly complex ideas (which I am enjoying), I have somehow come to care about the characters in a very signifigant way. Mr. Stephenson has managed to create a book that is incredibly difficult to parse, but the rewards for doing so are signifigant.

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  4

  Anathem

  by Hope Booker

  4 years ago

  I found this book hard to understand and therefore got bored with it.

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  Anathem by Neal Stephenson

  by Polish Mistress

  4 years ago

  Anathem written by Neal Stephenson, is a daunting novel, at 935 pages full of definitions and diagrams. I have to admit that my first time reading it I became extremely frustrated and basically gave up. Maybe I am just not intellectual enough I thought. But I am stubborn, as I put out a plea for help in understanding the novel and received some wonderful advice and help. An amazing thing than happened. I became enthralled with the odd world that Mr. Stephenson had created in Anathem. I admit, I still don"t understand everything I read, but I thoroughly enjoyed discovering this weird, mathematical (probably why I at first hated it) world that made my brain work with every paragraph. It's not a novel for the faint-of-heart but it is intriguing, mystifying, and, yes, even a little bit fun.

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  Anathem by Neal Stephenson

  by Polish Mistress

  5 years ago

  I've just finished this tome and all I can say is someone get me a Tylenol. I knew from the first page this was not my type of book. I almost gave up, even started a group on chapters.ca asking for help understanding the language of this book. I thought there must be someone who took the time to learn Klingon in Star Trek out there who would also love to learn the strange language of Anthem. I guess not, so I was left alone to muddle my way through. I grabbed a notebook and pen and decided I was going to get through this one way or the other. So I drew diagrams to go along with the many descriptions of buildings and such in the first part of the book. I kept my own little dictionary for the words, and ta-da! I did it! I made it through. Now do I get an award? At least Most Persistent. Once I understood some of the words, the storyline is quite entertaining. I finally figured out how the author came up with some words. What I'd really like to know is if I had an actual conversation with Neal Stephenson, would I understand him? Hmm.....

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  Brilliant, Complex and Engaging

  by Frank Furlano

  • Indigo Employee

  5 years ago

  A very complex read, especially due to the elaborate world that Stephenson has lovingly created. At first, there is a bit of a language barrier, I recommend book-marking the glossary of terms and flipping back and forth until you know what the terms mean by heart. Eventually, a strange thing happens, you come to understand what those words mean (some being very similar to our own), which I know happens with other Sci-fi/Fantasy works but not to this extent (it being one novel & not a series). This novel is very large in scope, as readers work through some complicated discussions of philosophy, mathematics and quantum mechanics (among others). At the heart of the novel though is a story about a world eerily similar to our own (Earth being down-wick or up of Arbre, not really sure yet), and also a main character who does not really know his place in the universe yet. It is not a coming of age story per se, but that is one way to describe this complex novel that will have you have thinking through theories and concepts long after you have finished reading this novel.

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  Always compelling, often muddled

  by Corey Redekop

  • Author

  5 years ago

  Some novelists pander to their audience. Others challenge them. Neal Stephenson might be determined to make his audience feel stupid, in the nicest possible way. The American novelist has long been considered one of the great madmen of science fiction, a towering intellect who synthesizes technical mumbo-jumbo and a Monty-Pythonesque capacity for silliness into daunting tomes as entertaining as they are impenetrable. Stephenson mashes up genres with the flair of Thomas Pynchon and the intellect of William Gibson, and the release of each new Stephenson epic is an event in sci-fi circles. Now, after flirting with historical fiction in his Baroque Trilogy, Stephenson has returned to his roots with a vengeance. Not only is Anathem a sprawling exercise in world-building and philosophical ramblings, it is his fifth novel in a row to weigh in at nearly 1000 pages. Set on the fictional yet oddly recognizable planet of Arbre, Anathem concerns itself with the goings-on of a ‘math’, a sort of monastery where, instead of concerning themselves with all things theological, the monks (or the ‘avout’) are more akin to scientists, clad in robes and seeking deep scientific and philosophical truths. The narrator, Fraa Erasmus, is a Decenarian, an avout who establishes contact with the world outside the math’s walls only once every ten years. Once outside, events are set in motion through the observance of strange lights in the sky. Erasmus is sent beyond the walls (or “extramuros”) to find Fraa Orolo, a fellow avout who may hold a key to the purpose of the lights, but who had been subject to an anathem, an excommunication whereby the avout has been “ejected from the math and his or her work sequestered.” Like Frank Herbert’s seminal work Dune, a large part of mastering Anathem’s dense narrative is coming to grips with its new set of words and definitions, aided through a handy glossary. Past that, the great challenge (and arguably the fun) of Anathem is wading through literally hundreds of pages of quantum mechanics, parallel universes, and enough philosophy to pummel the reader’s brain into tapioca. One’s reaction to Anathem is likely going to correspond to one’s tolerance for sentences such as “Following the Reconstitution, he was made patron Saunt of the Syntactic Faculty of the Concent of Saunt Muncoster.” Many will find it gibberish; many others will appreciate Stephenson’s refusal to make things easy. As intriguing and entertaining as Anathem can be, however, it may serve better as a primer for Philosophy 101 than it does a novel. Unlike his previous works such as the magnificently complex Cryptonomicon, Anathem never fully establishes a successful balance between the science and the narrative. Too often, the plot becomes bogged down in Stephenson’s exploration of philosophical ideas at the expense of clarity. While the attempt to co-mingle theorems with popular entertainment is admirable, Anathem never manages to connect with the reader on an emotional level. While hardly a disappointment, Anathem ultimately reveals itself as Stephenson’s weakest effort in some time. There is far too much exemplary work on display to consider Anathem a failure, but coming from Stephenson, the fact that it’s not a resounding success is a surprise indeed.