tl;dr: This book wasn't so great.

The ideas in the book were good, and I was reasonably engaged for the first 2 acts, but the last act felt dragged out and obvious. I was pretty sure about the major curves of the story early on, and it took a long-ass time to get there.. And then when it got where it was going it wasn't terribly satisfying...

This might be the last Stephenson book I read until he gets an editor. His stories are engaging, but he spends too much time zooming in on details. I guess some people dig that, but when I look back, even the books of his I've enjoyed since he wrote The Diamond Age have been long struggles for me to read. Cryptonomicon, which I liked in retrospect, took me years and several aborted/restarted attempts to complete. At the time I blamed that on College, but now I'm not so sure. The Baroque Cycle took me a decade, and I ultimately only finished it out of stubbornness. Anathem and it's invented-language gimmick infuriated me, but the story was compelling enough to drag me along.

Now his last two books have been largely (big) gimmick-free, but have both felt really stretched out. I think i like the macro of his stories much more than the micro, but he seems interested in focusing on the micro.

To be honest, if I could have given this book 2.5 stars I would have. I was really struggling to choose between 2 and 3 stars.