Just Finished Anathem

After several months of on again, off again reading, I've completed Neal Stephenson's Anathem. At 900+ pages, I'm glad I stuck with it.

I'm not sure how much I liked it, though. I believe, as one reviewer mentions on Slashdot, the novel was way too long. I suspect (and I base this thought on years of professional editing experience) the book could have been cut by some 300 or 400 pages.

But that's to be expected, anymore, with Stephenson. His "Baroque Cycle" spanned three volumes. Cryptonimicon, too, required stamina, courage and willpower.

While Anathem has great characters and a compelling story line, I felt at times as if I were plowing through an assignment. Passages required dedication, focus and commitment I often associate with reading Proust. That's asking too much of today's science fiction reader, I fear.

Still, there were rewarding moments. Here are my top quotes from the book, all of which will stick with me (and plan to see these showcased within the movie trailer if the motion picture rights are ever sold):

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor.

And...

Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.

Then there was this anticorporate nugget, as well:

So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.

Now it's on to Wallace's Infinite Jest. Out of the frying pan into the fryer, I suspect.