ugh. Reamde.

Reamde starts off with a lot of interesting ideas, and then morphs into quite possibly the worst watered-down, airport-paperback, fourth-rate-Tom-Clancy-triller nonsense I have ever read. Avoid it at all costs. Unbelievable plot and character motives. ick.

I really liked Reamde. It's a close second to Anathem as far as Neal Stephenson's books go for me.

If you can suspend disbelief at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation, it's pretty awesome.

Seconded. It's really awful. Read Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and Anathem.

The Russians were fun, if a bit cartoonish.

Man I am almost done Reamde and would not recommend that to anyone. I have a massive vocabulary and I was still looking up words every few pages. Every time I suspected it was a synonym for a simpler word, and every time I was right.

Writing aside I've found the plot pretty slow with not much interesting happening for most of the Zula portions (ie. middle half of the book). Maybe Stephenson's level of detail just isn't for me but it really wants for editing.

Tastes differ. I thought it was a fun story and a quick easy read. I'd recommend it to pretty much anyone. My wife, mother, and sister, all of whom are big readers but none of whom are really in the target nerd demographic, all liked it.

Anathem and Diamond Age were harder for me because of the depth of ideas. I had to slow down and think to get through them.

Baroque Cycle was harder because of the sheer number of characters with multiple and/or similar names, which is realistic but annoying. There's a list of characters in the back of the first book, which helps, but it's annoying to have to keep the first book handy when you're reading the others.

Stephenson does have a reputation for starting great books and not knowing how to finish them. But I think I've gotten more than my money's worth out of all of them.

I loved the Baroque Cycle, but I am also a history fan so a lot of the names were already familiar to me.

If you're familiar with his style, and you take Reamde for what it really is - stuff he played with while taking a break from "real work" after the massive Baroque trilogy - then it makes sense and it's quite enjoyable.

The Mongoliad is team-written, and it shows. It's a sprawling, uneven work, with interesting parts, but also tedious one. It is in no small part a vehicle for the authors' interest in the technical aspects of fighting with medieval weaponry.

In the parts of the Mongoliad I managed to make it through, there were characters and plots and swordfights the way you find characters and plots and sex in a porn flick. If that's your thing, you'll really like the book, but I'm just not that into swordfights.