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Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

I have loved Stephenson's work in the past, up until about Cryptonomicon. Everything I've read since has been a great short read, bundled up in a thousand pages.

Seveneves started off strong, but then turned into a real slog. It could have been a great 200 page book, but at 600 pages I was just glad to be done with it and expect it to be the last thing of his I read. The Baroque Cycle felt similar, even though it contained many of the characters I loved from Cryptonomicon, but I just couldn't make it through it.

I see there are people here who like or love it, which is great. I am not surprised to see others here echoing my feeling that it was quite a slog to get through.

Stopping at Act 2 is probably not a bad idea, though I feel like Act 1 is a lot of setup that pays off in Act 2 so I wonder what the point would be.

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I never finished the Baroque cycle, and never will, but enjoyed Anathem tremendously, and thought Reamde was a fun adventure novel.

But Anathem is his best work!

It's funny how personal all of these preferences are. I, personally, thought that "Diamond Age" was tepid, and "Zodiac" pretty stupid (but an early work, so forgiveable), but I've pretty well loved everything else that Stephenson wrote by himself. On the shared-author side of things, the DODO book is terrible - dropped after about 2 pages - and the Mongoliad stuff looks tripe too.

Anathem and Seveneves are among my favorites. And I really liked the entire Baroque Cycle! (after consciously avoiding it for years).

> the Mongoliad stuff looks tripe too

It's not like Stephenson's other works but I found it to be perfectly competent historical-ish fiction.

If the thing that most deeply interests you is Knowledge (with capital initial, and understood in the broadest sense possible), then Anathem is like catnip for your brain.

It's the book that shows how deeply the author understands what motivates knowledge geeks - be they active in science, technology, or any other field.

Reading it, nearly at every page I was like "wow, this guy gets it!"

I’m curious what parts you thought were a slog other than the last act? I presume you disliked other parts as well, because from my memory there was a lot more to the first two acts than 200 pages.

Not OP, but the chapter Ymir, near the end of the first act I'd waaaay too long.

I recall a lot of really deep dives into details that I don't feel moved the story along. In my mind, the wing suit, her trip back up in the wing suit, the ring world, a lot of these things were described in excruciating detail.

Maybe there is more to the book than could be fit into 200 pages, but I also don't feel like there was enough to it to fit into 600 pages.

I ended up skimming. A lot. I just didn't have the patience for pretty much everything post-white-sky until the leap forward in time.

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