Anathem

Another brilliant work by Neal Stephenson. Lots of blog chatter about the book, and as I expected people seem to either love or hate Stephenson's style - complex plots, wordiness, drawn out tangents, anticlimactic endings. I am squarely in the pro-Stephenson camp, as I appreciate books that require attention. I've read almost all of Stephenson's previous novels, and this is possibly his best. If you can't handle big words and big ideas, skip this book and stick to the Young Adult section at Barnes.

I admit to being wary of Stephenson's return to "science fiction" having grown attached to the historical fiction style of his previous two works, Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle. Fortunately this is not yet another "cyberpunk" novel; instead, it's an alternate-world masterpiece in the same league as Herbert's Dune and LeGuin's The Dispossessed.