The Sword and Laser discussion

When I checked out the Amazon preview a month or two back it said something like "Reamde is a fast-paced globe spanning thriller blah blah blah." And I thought yeah, sure, right, Neal Stephenson with a page-turner... but, you know, it sort of was.

On the other hand, it's missing most of the stuff I love in a Neal Stephenson book. No stints of Pynchon-esque prose, no slow unpacking of recondite ideas, no stopping to smell roses with no immediate relation to the main line of the plot. Bummer.

I can't imagine anyone else writing Anathem or the Quicksilver trilogy but I can imagine any number of other authors writing Reamde. This getting rid of everything but the plot might pay off in his next book but I hope he adds back in all the great stuff that are unique to him.

agreed...

I couldn't agree more! I'm 50% percent and I'll I keep checking if I'm reading Neal or (view spoiler)[ Tom Clancy (Of which I'm a fan of as well) because of the thugs and terrorist and over the top situations (hide spoiler)]

I agree. Yes, I like the book, but I probably won´t reread it, and that will be a first for me. Cryptonomicon and Anathem I started rereading after just finish them. I literally went from last page to first. The Baroque Cycle took me longer to retake, but mostly because I wanted the time to "quickly" read the three tomes in a row.

This was a good book, but somewhat trivial in effect compared to those.

Agreed. It keeps making me think about Mieville and how the wrote The City & the City for his mother, a lover of crime fiction. Who is Stephenson writing this for? It doesn't even really use the language atypically associate with him.

Funny you all say that it doesn't seem very much like Stephenson's other works. I'm a bit over 80% through and have felt it very much like other books of his. As a matter of fact, I was thinking if I heard this audio book blind and I didn't know who had written it, I would know it was Stephenson. It has his quirky style to it that I find very distinctive, whether it's historical fiction, straight cyber-punk, or spy-thriller-ish. Maybe the print version is giving you all a much different experience?

Being nearly done now, I do agree it has Neal's descriptive level I associate with him, and plot developments that very much remind me of Snow Crash. I believe for me it's because it was juxtaposed to recently against my reads of Anathem and Baroque Cycle where it is less fantastical might be the reason. Still I have to say I have enjoyed it, especially in audio form.

I think this is the reason I'm such a fan of this book. It's personally very nostalgic for me.I haven't read a good thousand page thriller in quite some time. I love how different this is from his other writings. I dunno, but it definitely feels like a Stephenson book to me. It's just a slightly different vocabulary and quite different subject matter, but it feels like him. I guess the sensibilities of the book feel like Stephenson to me. But maybe I'm just saying that because I know he wrote it.