Reamde by Neal Stephenson

Rating: 5

Reader: Malcolm Hillgartner
Short Review: A fantastic, well-read, fast-paced novel of hackers, criminals, anti-heroes, terrorists, and gamers.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Rating: 3

Reader: Oliver Wyman, Tavia Gilbert, William Dufris, Neal Stephenson

Short Review: A pretty good but overly long book from one of my favorite authors, read less-than-ideally. This alternate future tale depicts a world where the intellectual elite are forcibly cloistered in pseudo-monastic communities around the world where they’re free to think and learn but denied access to many technologies and to “saecular,” (i.e., non-intellectual) society. The protagonist Fraa Erasmus is layered and likeable, but the book could stand to lose a couple of hundred pages and the narration isn’t as good as it should be. In this instance, I think I would have preferred the paper book to the audio book.