Gorgeously sense book - perfect for hard sci-fi readers who enjoy a touch of philosophy and history. Love the writing style.

I guess I’m not smart enough to read this.

This is a complex interesting book. Many twists and turns but it wraps up nicely at the end.

Science fiction but a lot of basis from today's earth. I enjoyed the book and its characters, and was glad to be able to read it on by "jeejah" since it would have been a hefty book to carry with me.

Based on the description I thought the book sounded good. My recommendation is to read the sample before buying. It does not get better. Not the style of writing I like.

Few writers today can simultaneously entertain, educate, and expand a reader's view of the world quite so well as Neal Stephenson. This work is best suited for those readers seeking a bit more than a pleasant diversion. While fun and engaging, this book also draws the reader's mind to consider metaphysics, causality, and the relationship between human institutions of popular culture, academia, and religion. This comes about incidentally to an delightfully unpredictable adventure -- in much the same way Mr. Stephenson's earlier works carry readers into explorations of economics, cryptography, and nanotechnology. Reading his books is to engage in an epic battle between the instincts to savor and to devour. His stories leave the reader changed for the better, and I have seldom finished one without being immediately tempted to reread it from the beginning.

I love this book. It is one of the most interesting books I've ever read. Even though the first 1/3 is tough to get through, it is more than worth it when the book is finished. Everything is tied together and done so well it feels as if Neil Stephenson worked on this book for years. I've read it three times and loved it each time.

An ambitious attempt that falls flat. I can appreciate this book's attempt to capture a sense of life on a planet with an unimaginably long history through the use of language that sounds like it's some distantly evolved version of our own and through the slow revelation of a convulted history, and I can appreciate the attempt to turn string theory and quantum mechanics into the crux of this novel. Unfortunately, these attempts fall flat. It's just not fun spending most of the novel reading entries from a fake dictionary and reading faux-platonic dialogues devoted to theoretical physics. There's just enough plot interspersed between these portions to keep you reading. However, the characters and their relationships feel two-dimensional and wooden. Most of the characters are more caricature than character.

Great book. I can't recommend Anathem enough. The seamless synthesis of science and philosophy, of thought and machinery is the cornerstone of Anathem.

This is the greatest book I have ever read. Neal Stephenson created a world so vast and so detailed that I couldn't concentrate on anything else. I failed two my classes and now I'm on academic probation with my school. Thanks Neal.