I will start by saying that Neal Stephenson’s Anathemis a really long book. The hardcover was 890 pages of novel, plus nearly another hundred worth of appendix content. Now a book being long isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, it just means it is long, and if you are the kind of person who does not like devoting a lot of time to a single book then something like Anathem probably isn’t for you. I actually don’t usually mind long books, but I also haven’t been reading as much or as fast as I used to so it can be a little difficult when it takes over two months to read a single novel.
That being said I found Anatheman overall enjoyable story. I think that Mr. Stephenson did a great job at creating a interesting social structure and hierarchy as well as a truly original story in a science fiction genre that often has too many variations on the same theme. All and all I liked it. I thought the characters, especially the narrator Erasmus, were all interesting and relatively believable people. I was interested by the various plot developments and curious as to how everything was going to work out, which strikes me as an all around success in any novel.
My main detractor though goes back to the great length of the book. Upon finishing it, and at several times in the story, I felt that really it was just over stretching. I don’t think Anathem needed to be nearly 900 pages long. I don’t think that it even needed to be 500 pages long. yes there was a lot of interesting moments and a lot of characters and obviously Mr. Stephenson felt the need to fully develop the society in this world which is quite different than anything that we know, but there just seemed to be a lot of stuff that seemed to drag forever unnecessarily. And while I don’t know for sure, I imagine that the original draft was significantly longer than the published book because there were some parts that read as if Mr. Stephenson had more that he wanted to write but didn’t include.
My personal conclusion to this is that the book should have just trimmed down and focused more on exact plot points, or Mr. Stephenson should have opted to write a couple books, like a trilogy. Now sure, you can ask how a trilogy where each book is about 300 pages long would be that different than a 900 page book, but I think that it definitely would. It would create a bit more of a differentiation in the story arks, and possibly have allowed Stephenson to add that bit more that at times seemed missing. It is kind of a tough call but, that is my overall feeling.
I will give Anathem an A for overall plot and concept and a B for overall reading enjoyment and experience. Probably not for everybody, but I think some people will really like it.
