REAMDE (Neal Stephenson, 2011)

No I haven't stopped reading. I was just doing my annual 1000+ page book read. Last year the honor went to Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth (he will likely be my big read of 2015), which clocked in just a hair under quadruple digits. When you set a goal of 52 books a year and you aren't a fast reader, adding huge books like this to your reading queue naturally gives you pause. In fact, I decided not to add a 1100 page biography of Beethoven to my queue mostly because of its length, though the glowing reviews gave me a measure of regret. Fortunately I put down enough quick and short reads earlier in the year to earn about a four-book buffer, which this book pretty much destroyed. So the good news is I'm still on track!

The last novel Neal Stephenson wrote that was under 800 pages was The Diamond Age, from way back in 1995. In 1999 he blew the lid off of the 500-page barrier with the release of Cryptonomicon and there was no looking back as he embarked on the adventurous 2400-page 3-book Barque Cycle and the wildly imaginative Anathem. All of the aforementioned works here are pretty different from one another, so it would be folly to assume REAMDE would be related to any of these works.

Basically, to the utter disappointment of those who loved Anathem, this is a very long techno-thriller and falls somewhere between Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, though I don't think loyalists of those books would find this one to be better than those. It's a return to the virtual vs. the real a la Snow Crash, but with the modern day and recent history sensibilities of Cryptonomicon. We're in the here and now, so there isn't a whole lot of spectulativeness. We aren't plugging in computers to VR machines and the structures of society are largely familiar to our own. If you were expecting pizza delivery mafia conglomerates, they aren't here. On the other hand, there is a strong "virtual world" component to this novel and the importance of games and computer networks cannot be emphasized enough in the narrative, even when the characters are running around the streets of China or the backwoods of Idaho.

In the end, I agree with most that this isn't Stephenson's best work, but it isn't a waste of time. Plus uses the narrative style that is distinctively Stephenson. Sometimes he has such a strange way of wording things you can't help but laugh. Without spoiling anything, I will say that I appreciate that this book has an actual ending, something strangely difficult to find in his novels.