Anathem

The book starts with a lot of descriptions and made up words, two of the things I hate most on books. Then it is followed by nonsense dialog. I imagine it will make sense latter, but this is no way to start a book for me. I felt a completely lack of connection to the story or empathy for the characters.

I stopped reading during a scene in a classroom I believe, where the “students” where arguing about their “religion” in a textbook like excitement.

My fourth Neal Stephenson book. His books are clearly not my kind of reading.

The emphasis (added by me) in the following comment captures one of the two aspects I most dislike about his books.

“You probably couldn't get a lot of people to read a frequently dry 937 page text on the material Stephenson is covering, but you might could if you dressed it up in the form of a science fiction story about an alternate world where the schism between science and religion occurred at the dawn of Western Civilization and both retreated to cloisters to observe their respective discipline.”
Matt

The second one is the hard sci-fi thing, with lots of made up concepts/words. It is not the difficulty to understand, just the usefulness of that kind of language is lost on me.

READ 7% 2:24/32:14