The Baroque Cycle made double-entry bookkeeping click for me, bizarre as that sounds. The whole cycle is a long, long read. But there are nuggets that make it well worth it.

Anathem really picks up after the first 400-500 pages.

I am the rare Anathem reader who enjoyed the slow first part more than the active later parts. The initial world immersion was fascinating. The Big Event and subsequent faster paced developments were a lot less memorable. But I also enjoyed the instructional sections about whaling in Moby Dick.

I laughed. It's both true, and very not helpful. It's the equivalent of a fairly long not-so-great book before a pretty good book. Hard agree.

Also agreed, although I enjoyed some of the philosophical debate in the early portions of the book so I would put Anathem higher in books I enjoyed from Neal Stephenson

The first part of the book is super slow and boring, but it does get much better later on and what they setup is necessary for the story.

personally, I found Anathem to be fun the whole way through, but Baroque Cycle has like only one enjoyable part at the end of book two