Review: Anathem

I just fin­ished read­ing Anathem by Neal Stephen­son a few days ago. At 960 pages, this was a pretty hefty book and took a few weeks to read, but the read was well worth it.

Anathem is a hard book to describe with­out ruin­ing the read­ing expe­ri­ence. I was for­tu­nate enough to read it while hav­ing absolutely no idea what it was about, but I’ll give you a pinch of info on it. The book takes place on another world, sim­i­lar to Earth and pop­u­lated with beings sim­i­lar to humans. The author has cre­ated sev­eral words that are dif­fer­ent enough to help you remem­ber that you aren’t on Earth, but close enough to the words you already know that you won’t have to keep a spe­cial dic­tio­nary handy to look the terms up.

The peo­ple of this world, Arbre, and divided into two major groups: the Saec­u­lar (the nor­mal every­day peo­ple) and the Mathic (the unusu­ally smart sci­en­tists). The Math­ics are inter­ested in expand­ing and pre­serv­ing knowl­edge, whereas the Saec­u­lars are inter­ested in the same things we are (fast food, cell phones, work).

The two groups get along fine most of the time, and the begin­ning of the story is mainly char­ac­ter devel­op­ment and new-world accli­ma­tion for the reader, but sud­denly and (to me at least) unex­pect­edly, a plot twist is thrown in. Just when you start to get used to the twist, BAM! You find out the twist isn’t what you thought it was.

Any­ways, I don’t want to ruin it for you in case you decide to read it. It is a pretty good deal at only $19.77 at Ama­zon for a 960 page hard cover.