Anathem

In the end it felt inevitable, having finished Gilgamesh I could just not resist buying this great new work of speculative fiction by Neal Stephenson. The clue is already on the cover where we learn about the main character Erasmas or “Raz”, “a young avout living in the Concent”. Due to a memorable anglo-slavic (sic!) misspelling I felt an immediate sense of identification. As evident in his other books, Stephenson suffers from severe graphomania, this time the page count stops just before a thousand, probably only because it then reached the absolute limits of paperback printing.