Reamde

It all depends on why you read Neal Stephenson. If you read Neal Stephenson because you can't handle going to work at your software engineering film and hearing “did you read the newest Stephenson novel?” all day without breaking (or because you have a completionist attitude towards top ten lists or a bevy of related reasons) this is going to be the most painful novel you've ever attempted to read.

If you read Neal Stephenson because you love his Neal Stephenson-ness and the fact that there is no detail too small to be explained in depth and no side plot too irrelevant to devote 50+ pages to, this is Neal Stephenson at his Neal Stephenson-iest.

I, however, am in the middle. I love the idea of reading cyber-cultural tomes and I have a weakness for info-dumps. So there were things I loved about the book: the central importance of an MMORPG and the exploration of the sheer diversity of a player base. I loved the exploration of startup culture and the info dumps on Chinese ethnic minorities and the intricacies of flight planning. I took the seven plus main plotlines with complaint - at least they were largely presented in serial, rather than parallel.

However, I took exception to the fact that this book is fat. Not just large, and not just Neal Stephenson-y crammed with details, but seriously in need of editing. When an entire paragraph is dedicated to whether or not a character pulled the shower curtain closed, you have to seriously consider what sort of editing failed to happen. And when I say that there was nothing too trivial to write about, it's like in order to explain what I ate for dinner, I first had to explain my cooking process (with a twenty page aside into the biochemistry thereof), then my shopping trip, the motivations of my grocery store clerk, but also the entire pedigree of the cow that provided my milk and the intrafamilial fighting of the farming clan that raised said cow. And now pretend that such 100 page long diversions are occurring when you last left the characters that you cared about in a boat stranded in the Philippine Sea, out of fuel.

Still, I knew what I was getting into, and it must be said that Neal Stephenson is definitely one of the Authors of Our Time - the advantage of the glut is that he hit on almost every major trope in current culture, making this probably one of the most relevant books today.