Anathem
I feel pretty sure that Neil Stephenson's Baroque Cycle has vaulted to the very top of my favorite books list-- certainly it is my favorite series of books. This makes it all the more heartbreaking that I do not think Anathem is great. 1) it's upsetting because I really wanted to love this book and 2) it's upsetting because now I'm kind of afraid
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I actually feel the same way about the baroque cycle that you do about anathem, apparently, because Cryptonomicon is one of MY favorite books, and when the first volume of the baroque cycle came out I was super excited, so I vaulted into it, hated it, put it away for like 2 years, decided to start reading it again (because I didn't have anything else and I was going on a long plane trip), read enough of it that I felt compelled to finish it, and then felt like I was doing boring homework for the final 2000 pages.
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If you hate that part of The Baroque Cycle, which I could take or leave, you will definitely hate Anathem. Unlike Quicksilver, where such a discussion might be amusingly tied in to the story, Anathem, has things like: "While we rested and sipped water, Fraa Criscan went on to give us a calca* about Complex Protism."
*See Calca 3"
Then you flip to the appendix to be annoyed further if you are a masochist. I am not a masochist, so any appendices to the book will go unread by me.
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