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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.

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.)

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.