Anathem

Straight to favorites.

As much as it looks like a longer A Canticle For Leibowitz, it is not. They are quite different in basically everything. 

There is no way to tell what this book is about without spoiling it. Understanding it slowly is one of its joys. So it is better to avoid reading most reviews because they possibly contain some spoilers. 

This is one of those books I wanted to reread immediately after finishing it—almost a thousand pages of pure metaphysical speculation.

A bit of patience is needed to get through it, as by the 200-page mark is when everything just starts unwrapping. I mean this in the sense of understanding what the book is about and the meaning of the made-up words.

It will get some more complexity, but in the form of concepts. There will be ideas from Plato and Socrates on philosophy, Pythagoras and Einstein from mathematics and physics, and religion from St. Augustine and others, just to name a few. If you are familiar with that, it will be cool to make the connections, and if not, you can look up after finishing to match which current of thought belongs to the Earth counterpart.

By the last third of the book there will be more than that, just pages of dry academic discussion, materialism, metaphysics, interpretation of quantum mechanics, mathematics, and philosophy all thrown in the form of discussing-over-a-meal.

If you like reading and watching all those "old" debates and discussions about these themes, you will certainly enjoy this; if not, this might be another mountain to climb to finish the book, but by this point you might be enjoying the ride already.

PS: Iolet (The Music of Anathem) is an album that collects sequences and chants from the ones described in the book, which apparently come from mathematical formulae.