REAMDE was given to Olman by his BIL some Christmases ago,
and Olman passed it on to me.
It was a fun, but rather overlong, read that encompassed
1056 pages. Olman had warned me that
Stephenson can be overly nerdy in his descriptions. I had thought that with this length, there
would've been some interesting themes to explore, but there really weren’t
any.
REAMDE was just a globe-trotting
techno-thriller adventure story where unlikely characters got thrown together,
not just in the physical world, but within the virtual world of T’Rain.
Here’s a sample cast of characters: a former smuggler now MMORPG entrepreneur,
his adopted Eritrean-American niece, her cyber-slacker BF from Seattle, a
Hungarian hacker, another Chinese hacker, a Hakka street seller, a
Chinese-British MI6 spy. Mix in Russian
mobsters, Islamic terrorists, and Christian isolationalists.
I don’t mind super long novels if they're written well
and enable me to immerse myself in the story and details, such as the wonderful
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
At some point in the middle, I realized REAMDE wasn’t
going to be a ‘great’ novel, so I started skimming over the overly detailed and
sloggy expository sections. I felt that
even Stephenson was impatient to wrap up his novel towards the end because the
final confrontation and shootout between the terrorists and the main
protagonists at an isolationist homestead felt very rushed.
REAMDE would have been a great book to recommend if it
had been pared down to half its length.
This was my first Neal Stephenson novel and it was obvious REAMDE was
not the best introduction to his work (Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon might be
better - both copies I have on my on-deck).
Here’s a very thorough, detailed review that aligns with
my feelings about the book:
http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2011/12/reamde-by-neal-stephenson.html
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