I am an avid reader, so I read just about everything from cereal boxes to novels. If you catch me in read mode there is no stopping me. Usually I will finish one book and pick up a new book to read within a few minutes.
However, every so often a book comes along that is so profound that I cannot pick up another book to read for up to a month. Recently this happened to me again. The book this time was Anathem by Neal Stephenson.
I bought it during Border's closeout sale. I bought a lot of books during our local Border's bankruptcy, but this was the first of the novels I got to read. I had already read Snow Crash by Stephenson years back and loved it. I just never took the time to read anymore of his works. I picked Anathem for the synopsis in the back. Really it was a poor description of the book I was about to immerse myself in. I will say that Anathem is not an everyday book. It says it was on the bestsellers, but I wonder just how many people read it all the way through. It gets into some heavy metaphysics, epistemology, chemistry, quantum physics and more of the sciences. I myself was not sure if I could finish this book. I would describe the world, but the almost 1000 page novel spends a few hundred pages just explaining in what world they live in. It is not earth and it is not a parallel world. It is almost like a better world, a more pure world. Whatever happens to them trickles down some sort of ether into the next world and next. Earth is among the list of worlds (but certainly not the first nor the last). The book states several hypotheses of how many worlds there might be and how they are all connected. In fact, there is an appendix and a glossary to help understand this novel. Just writing this out reminds me how confusing it can all be without a good and proper explanation.
Still, I was entranced by the storytelling and the adventure I embarked upon. Profound? Yes. Enough so to write a blog about it.
