Neal Stephenson writes about big ideas. Frequently very big ideas. It can be a little off putting at times.

Certainly the first few chapters for Anathem were a struggle. Stephenson threw me head first into a new world with a new language and very little explanation. It was frustrating.

But perseverance sometimes pays off and it did in this case. Once I started to get a feel for the setting, the richness of it and some of the ideas that Stephenson was playing with started to shine.

Personally I found this a much more compelling story than Cryptonomicon. Admittedly at least half of it is people standing around and telling each other things, but Stephenson has a knack for making that seem interesting.

He's always had a fondness for playing with language and he gets to take that to the nth degree here. There's an impressive logical consistancy to the evolution of language displayed here and it's actually one of my favorite parts of the book. I'm not quite so keen on some of the more out there ideas that are introduced later on.

There are some sections that really weren't entirely necessary. Parts of the road trip seemed to serve very little actual purpose and at 900+ pages I'm pretty sure it could have benefited from some editing. But over all I think it's one of his stronger works.