Ben Smithgall

Welcome to the web blog

Bit pusher at Spotify. Previously Interactive News at the New York Times, U.S. Digital Service, and Code for America.

Home

Blog

Books

Projects

Anathem

By Neal Stephenson

Finished reading on December 29, 2018

I love Anathem; I think it’s a wonderful example of what I love about Stephenson’s books. He takes a Big Idea™ and constructs an entire world around it. The Ideas in this book are Platonic epistemology and forms, and the many-worlds view of the cosmos, which I think Stephenson is somewhat obsessed with (it turns out to be an important part of the other Stephenson book I read on vacation, Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.).

Like many of Stephenson’s books, it’s a lot of work and takes some time to get going. A number of interesting diversions don’t help with the pacing. Many pages are spent on a number of largely meaningless distractions that might alternatively madden or interest a reader. This is, though, part of what makes reading Stephenson so unlike reading almost anyone else: who else would dedicate a long aside to an aperiodic tiling problem or include three fictional Socratic dialogues as appendices? Where else do you find a first-contact story to be an excuse for a quantum exploration of Platonic forms?

This was the third or fourth time I’ve read Anathem, and I look forward to getting more out of it for years to come.

★★★★★