Just finished the audio version of Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Since the book has been out for almost a year, after the jump I am not going to worry about "minor" spoilers. If you have not read the book, the short review is...

It's not as good as Snow Crash or The Diamond Age, however it is very good. The story is extremely compelling and well written. The further into the book I got, the harder it was to put it down. As when I'm actually reading dead pulp, I found myself staying up hours past my normal bed time trying to get to a "good" stopping point that would never come. I have problems with the ending, but they are not enough to prevent my strong recommendation for the book.

Anathem on Amazon.
Track Anathem's price on PriceChirp.(audio)

More follows....

The book is a first person account of Fraa Erasmas as he goes from a pupil of Fraa Orolo locked up in the Concent of Saunt Edhar to the adventures across the world and beyond and learns about narratives and the poly-cosmos.

The first third of the book is a bit on the slow side, but it does an excellent job of putting you in the middle of this world. It makes you care for all the main characters as they interact with each other. You learn a lot of vocabulary. And you start to understand a world where the scholars are forced to live like monks and can only interact with the outside world for a few days out of every year, 10 years, 100 years, or even 1000 years depending on what type of Concent they live in.

The second third of the book speeds up. It covers the travels of all the main characters to the Convox on the far side of the world. While this third was fast paced and entertaining, probably half of it could have been abridged with no loss to the story.

The final third continues the fast pace with the occasional long winded dialog. Dialogs are talks whereby a teacher attempts to part knowledge on one or more students. These dialogs where intended to familiarize the readers with the concepts of multi-cosmos and narratives that can span these cosmoses.

The finale had some inconsistent physics problems and had a sequence where by all the main characters winked knowingly at each other so as not to divulge their share secret. This lead me to believe they would have a final dialog in private to go over the stranger aspects of the end of the book. This never happened and left me slightly under-satisfied.

Even with these minor gripes, the book was compelling, entertaining, and very hard to put down. I highly recommend it to others looking for a fun story.