My thoughs on Neal Stephenson's new novel _Reamde_

[kestrell]

I downloaded _Reamde_ either Wednesday or Thursday, and I've been pretty much reading it continuosly since then. While it is another one thousand page tome, I found it to be fast-paced and enjoyable from start to finish.

I think Reamde_ may be Stephenson's most technically mature work so far: not only is it well-plotted and well-paced, but the story keeps going right up until the end (saving a very short but satisfying epilogue chapter), completely avoiding Stephenson's weakness--until now--of having very weak abrupt endings.

I don't really want to say too much about the story, since it has lots of surprises, but I will say that it is a cyberthriller which involves an online game, and all fo he characers are believably non-superhuman. Also, there's a believable disabled character and everybody keeps their scars at the end, as opposed to to the sort of story where everyone seems to have access to magic healing spells.

For the curious, Jaws unexpectedly but happily pronounces the title (which I think is correct) as "reamed," although Jaws pronounces "reamed" as "re-aimed."

Comments

[kestrell]

Re what format I read in: while Bookshare produces books in Daisy, I often just unzip the file and extract the xml file, then change the extension to HTML and read it. hat should preserve the formatting, what formatting exists. in HTML.

[jesse_the_k]

Your capacity to read mirrors a front-end-loader's capacity to garden. I'm jealous! Thanks for indulging my curiosity. I'm shocked the Booksense doesn't even give you capitalization—it's handy info for spelling tests and such.