Absolutely loved everything about the virus, T'Rain, and the hackers. Really wish the book would have focused more on that than (view spoiler)[on the terrorist plot (hide spoiler)]. With that, my attention was definitely held - but mostly because I wanted to see the conclusion of the story.One thing that did impress me, though, was the care that was put into ensuring the characters (good and bad ones) made logical decisions. None of Stephenson's characters here are stupid, and it was satisfying

Me: la la la I'm sure this will be edifying and weird.Book: Yes this will be a book about math and philosophy and like, historical dudes J/K actually I am like 14 Die Hards all squished together! Me: SHut up, I have to stop reading this and actually make a living!Book: no YOU shut up!! Me: Seriously, they say people need to sleep occasionally.Book: Bitch, I am NOT DONE. I will TELL YOU when you can sleep.

Damn, but this book exhausted me. It wasn’t just having to hold up it’s 127 lbs. of bulk while trying to read that wore me out either.Stephenson hasn’t made it easy on his fans since Cryptonomicon in 1999 with it and every book since being about 27,000 pages long while spanning the late 1600s in Europe to World War II to another world complete with it’s own languages and customs, and each book was also crammed with detailed information about topics like finance and code breaking. When I saw that...

I love Neil Stephenson (most of the time), and I loved this book - most of the time. When He's good he's brilliant, but when he's bad he's mind numbingly dull. This is probably his most commercial/mainstream book yet - It screams please make me into to a Hollywood action movie, or big budget miniseries. For my taste it screams this too loudly.The best parts of the novel are about the Chinese hacking and Gold Farming scene, the REAMDE virus- all classic slick Stephenson. Once we are back in Ameri...

I thought, when I started reading this book, that Stephenson had turned in a classic Great American Novel. By that I mean that the introduction to the main character (although actually this is a seriously ensemble piece, so it’s probably better to think of him as the spine character – the events in the book could not take place without him, even when – as much of the time – he’s out of the room and has no knowledge of what’s going on) is a perfect, serious statement of a particular moment of Ame...

I took the week off between Christmas and New Years and decided the perfect book to end the year with was the new woolly MAMMOTH sized Neal Stephenson book. Because we were traveling down to the in-laws house, a 12 hour trip to the ship channel in Texas, I checked out a library copy. With this size of book it is easy to break the spine while reading it and this is a book that actually forces the reader to abuse it to actually read the book. In retrospect, though I was glad I didn't have to tortu...

REAMDE reads as though he started to write an interesting novel about massively multiplayer online gaming business and frauds, and inadvertently stumbled into writing an irritatingly conventional thriller novel about Islamic terrorists when the MMPORG novel turned out not to have enough action in it. I wonder, actually, if this is his 9/11 book, delayed somehow by nonliterary circumstance. Cardboard villains seen up close to be mere dark-skinned cartoons of inexplicable evil, heroic northwestern...

It's important for writers to recognize their strengths. With Reamde, it's clear that Neal Stephenson has embraced his: the infodump. There are infodumps about the setting of wind shield wipers on cars in Seattle, bears roaming the Rockies, and Walmart.These may not be thrilling subjects, but Reamde is an infodump fueled thriller. After just 300/ 1000 pages, Stephenson grows tired of American Walmarts. Before we know it, his hero's niece, Zula, is kidnapped and flown to China, where we are given...

“Birth and death,” Chet said. “The poles of human existence. We’re like meridians, all beginning and all ending in the same place. We spread out from the beginning and go our separate ways, over seas and mountains and islands and deserts, each telling our own story, as different as they could possibly be. But in the end we all converge and our ends are as much the same as our beginnings Neal Stephenson has taken the notion of a multi-player, on-line video game as the basis for an action nove

I know, I know. When Stephenson writes really smart, I get annoyed while I force myself to finish the book (Quicksilver). When he writes a (sometimes) action-packed crime novel full of terrorists and international espionage and virtual worlds (Reamde), I get stuck near page 100 or 200 and allow myself to be talked into pushing onward, and start regretting it around page 700, and feel annoyed when I finally finish. Here's the thing. I like a fun crime novel. I read all the Stieg Larsson books. I

At over 1000 pages, this book has the scale of epic tomes such as The Stand and 1Q84, though the the story itself seems to bear a much closer relationship to Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. It has vast geographic spread, featuring action in settings as widely spaced as Idaho USA, the Philippines, China and (very briefly) the UK. But outside of these real life locations there is a good deal going on within the confines of a multiplayer online role-playing game that has much in common with World

By the time I was about three-fourths of the way through, I found myself wondering why Stephenson had bothered to write this book. Aside from The Big U I've read all of his other works, and in each of those he used his skills — his knowledge of math and computers, his understanding of how computer engineers and programmers handle information — to build a compelling world and tell a meaningful story (often with social commentary) from a unique perspective. In Reamde Stephenson clearly stepped far...

[Note: longer review now in place. Spoilers may be present.]So: your starter for 10. Is it Reamde? Remade? Reamed? Read Me? Just working out the title can be a complication in itself. But then that’s what you should expect with Neal Stephenson’s books. It’s a well known adage in the genre that if you read Neal Stephenson’s books, you’re there for a long journey. And so it goes with this one: over 1000 pages of small text, over 2 inches/6cm thick. (I measured it!)For what is typical of Neal’s w...

Neal Stephenson's Reamde is over a thousand pages long. ONE THOUSAND PAGES. In the same way that I avoid movies over 130 minutes (especially if they're historical costume drama, egads) my self-diagnosed ADD usually keeps me away from books over, say, 500 pages. Exceptions exist, of course, and this novel caught my eye because 1) I had read and liked/loved Stephenson's The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Cryptomicon, and 2) I was experiencing one of those uncomfortable “I don't know what to read” st...

Great book!! Not my usual fair at all. This was a thriller with online gaming undertones. I actually learned quite a bit about the role playing games. Interesting tangents. Characterization was very good. You understood what was in the minds of everyone (except the jihadists. How could the author or anyone sane possibly know what goes on in the minds of jihadist.../sarcasm). This novel had everything I like. Strong characters both male and female, humor and lots of it (particularly around T'Rai...