Quick Thoughts: Anathem (Book Review)
I have a huge stack of business books I’m slogging through related to what I do (think “Trust Agents”, “Groundswell”, “The Fourth Turning”, things like that). I periodically insert a “brain candy” book in there to keep myself from going nuts and feeling like I’m doing homework.
The most recent “brain candy” book has turned out not to be brain candy at all. I bought it while I was on my way to DC a while back and have been reading it ever since, off and on. For someone who usually chews up these little throw away paperbacks from the airport in a matter of hours, that’s a long time to still be slogging through a book!
What is it? It is called Anathem by Neal Stephenson. What’s it about? A planet similar to Earth, but where avout “monks” live in “maths” and study and philosophize based on equations and such, and well, a lot more stuff than that but it’s so long and slow to read it’s hard to sum up, even for this voracious reader. It’s what I’d consider speculative fiction, which is why I picked it up, but there are a number of things about it which annoy me and which are throwing me off the thread (by the way, if you love math, you may actually love this book’s premise).
First of all, it’s wicked long. Normally, this doesn’t bother me a bit. I’m a fan of a good story, no mater how long it takes to tell. In this case, it’s driving me nuts. I’m only half done and it is only just NOW starting to pick up a little in pace. That’s a problem in a 970+ page book.
Second, it inserts definitions every other page for the “new language” the book uses. That is so distracting! The words are based in latin roots and used in context. It brings me out of your “world” you are trying to create to keep giving me the dumb definitions. Let me immerse myself in it, already. It wouldn’t be so bad if the author had footnoted these in an index – I could ignore the numeric tags in the text and ignore the separate index and just let myself “be” in the world. But no, we get these chunked up pages that are driving me batty.
Lastly, a key component of these different orders of monks and secular people in the book is that the monks, no matter which order they are in, like to debate points with the goal of learning. Fantastic, I loved that idea! However, I don’t think the author was in a debate class. Ever. The debates don’t ring true as being the type of debate that would stem from greater intelligence or study. They feel more like the Teacher’s Assistant in college trying to debate a high schooler most of the time, and two middle schoolers having a pseudo-intellectual “brawl” after an advanced philosophy class the rest of the time.
I haven’t finished this book yet, but I will. I’m like that – too stubborn to put a book down once I start to read it. I’ve only abandoned a couple of books in my lifetime (trust me, they were really bad). If you’ve read it, weigh in below in comments – would love to hear your thoughts.
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