Book Log 2008 #51: Anathem by Neal Stephenson

There's no easy way to sum up this book. It runs over 900 pages, has two appendices, a timeline and a 20+ page glossary. It takes place on a planet where deep thinkers are cloistered and rarely interact with the outside world, where people are fixated on their handheld devices and eat food laced with a drug that placates them. This order changes dramatically during the course of the book, but as you might expect in a book this long it does so at length, and more than once with an aside that gives some level of background or insight as to why a character does what they do.

But there's no easy way to say that things go from A to B to C when you wind up taking side trips to F, N, and Q, or when moving from B to C involves discussions of space-time theory and the history of wine making on Arbre (the planet where most of the book takes place). But it's well worth wading through, flipping between the text and glossary, and accepting that there's some percentage of the book you may not get the first time around when the quality of the writing is this high. Block off a couple of weeks and give this a go.

(As an added bonus, the website for the book includes a music section with recordings of various chants that the mathic types would have performed. A must if you ever wanted to hear a proof of the quadratic equation in musical form.)