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Comment by MagicWishMonkey | Hacker News Reader

Anathem was kind of a slog for the first 200-250 pages, but then it started to get good, and then awesome, by the end of the book my mind was thoroughly blown.

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Vonnegut spoke at my convocation. His advice for fiction writers was to write your whole work and then throw away the first chapter, thus dumping your reader into the action. He despised setup.

Vonnegut was one of a kind in many ways.

My first reaction to the linked excerpt was that Seveneves reminded me of Galapagos (thematically)

I didn't find the beginning quite a slog but I did wonder if there was going to be a "plot" in the conventional sense. As you say, the rest of the book was a near-continuous crescendo. One scene in particular (Saunt Bucker's Basket!) made me literally stop reading while my brain processed.

My wife read my copy after me. If I remember correctly, she more or less read up to that scene in 5-10 page increments, and then read from that scene to the end in most of one night.

> Saunt Bucker's Basket!

That was, bar none, the best reading experience in my life.

what chapter is that in?

I don't write fiction but when I write longer-form articles, whitepapers, and so forth I find that a good percentage of the time I end up going back and chopping out a good bit of what a former boss described as "throat clearing" at the beginning. Not always; sometimes by chance I hit on a good metaphor or story or some other lead-in that works. But at least as often it's way too much digression and backstory and setup in advance of getting to the actual topic at hand.

With respect to Anathem in particular a lot of the problem is you didn't really understand what was going on for quite a while and I found that made it a bit of an effort to keep going.

That was part of the payoff, though. You're confused at first, wondering wtf is up with the vocabularly people are using, it all starts to make sense about 3/4 of the way through the book.

Damn, I need to read that one again. It's been too long.

And when you read it again, you might find that it's still too long!

I kid, I kid. I ended up loving Anathem too, although I seriously struggled to get going.

The new vocabulary was tough. It was a difficult thing to keep a track of through the whole book.

A Clockwork Orange was the same way. Real effort to get through the first 50 pages or so.

earlier editions of A Clockwork Orange had a Nadsat dictionary in the back for reference.

It is and, as I recall, Stephenson said as much in a foreword or afterword. Most of the book is an exercise in only partly understanding what's really going on or even the frame of reference you should be applying. It was well done and I enjoyed the book in the end but it definitely had a certain bar to clear in order to get into it. (In general, I find Stephenson's recent books could be tightened up and I didn't really like Reamde; it was a page-turner but suffered from coincidences driving plot.)

I had the opposite trajectory. I loved the early worldbuilding but didn't really care for the magical powers invoked at the end.

Glad I'm not the only one.

I think I started, and then shelved, Anathem three times before finally powering through the first third of the book and like you was hooked once I did.

Hmmm. Maybe I'll give it another shot. I started Anathem twice and just couldn't get into it.

This is how Cryptonomicon was for me. Anathem, I read after that, and I kinda understood what I was getting into, so I got through it much more more quickly.

The first time I read Anathem it was certainly slow to get through the first 200 pages, because I kept referencing the glossary to learn the vocabulary. The 2nd and 3rd times I read it the entire book flowed much more smoothly, and even the beginning was quite enjoyable.

I had the exact same experience with Anathem.

I remember around the 200-page point thinking, "ok, now we're getting started."

I had the same experience, anathem took me 4 tries, but eventually I got through the first 200 pages and then thoroughly enjoyed it.

I gave up within the first couple hundred pages. Just wasn't enjoying it.

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