I just finished reading Neal Stephenson’s new 1042
page tome, Reamde. Can’t say that I enjoyed it. I’ve read a few other
works by him, namely Snow Crash and Diamond Age, and I enjoyed
them both very much, but this one was a slugfest from the word go. This was the single longest book I’ve read
and actually finished. It was more out
of stubbornness than anything else though. I’ll warn you now there may be some
spoilers in this.
There are some good aspects to the book. The writing
is done well, grammatically correct and well punctuated. I didn’t notice any
editorial problems from that standpoint. The plot is fairly intricate, moves at
a moderate pace initially and covers a lot of territory, which Neal obviously
spent a lot of time researching, because he doesn’t hold back any detail. I mean
ANY. He waxes on for paragraphs about stuff that has absolutely nothing to do
with the story and not just a couple of times, but throughout the book. He could have easily cut 500 pages out of
this and it would not have changed the story in any meaningful way. Surely he had an editor, but maybe he refused
to budge on their recommendations. I
have no way of knowing. As I said, there
is plenty of plot here, but no real story in the sense that I understand story.
I’ll get back to that.
