An an(a)themic prelude to tentacles

Yes, yes, the tentacle-pic post I promised you on Thursday is still coming. But first, I thought you'd like to know how I'm getting along with Neal Stephenson's Anathem since last I blogged about it. I'm not able to read it as quickly as I'd like because things like, you know, life keep getting in the way. But I'm still enjoying it tremendously. As I've continued to read, and as I stumbled across a slightly spoilery review I should not have read, my reactions have progressed something like this:

Aha! I was right about him becoming important!....Huh, I was completely wrong about that being important....On the other hand, it looks like I'm right about him....Oooh, I'll bet the mystery object is ____....Oh, hey, maybe that really is going to be important after all!....Wow, I sure didn't see that coming!....Now, how is Stephenson going to tie this and that together?....Hooray! I was hoping she'd come back into the picture!

As you can see, I'm trying hard not to spoil anything for any of you who don't want to be spoiled. Fortunately, I just ran across a passage that perfectly sums up Stephenson's wry brilliance without giving away a hint of plot. It is also, IMO, very reminiscent of Terry Pratchett:

We crossed the causeway between the twin fountains and entered into the burgers' town. An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.

Now here's another, somewhat more spoilery quote of the kind you might find right inside the front cover, just to let you know what sort of a story you were in for. If you're intent on starting Anathem from a position of complete ignorance, just skip this next block quote; but I have to say that it's not too spoilery, since it still comes only a third of the way into the story:

     "Give me an adventure."
     In the moment that followed, Cord realized that this sounded weird, and lost her nerve. She held up her hands. "I'm not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I'm old."
     Now for the first time I reviewed everything that had happened in the last twelve hours. It made me a little dizzy.
     "Raz?" she said, after a while.
     "I can't predict the future," I said, "but based on what little I know so far, I'm afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing."
     "Great!"
     "Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial."
     That quieted her down a little bit. But after a while, she said: "Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?"
     "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor."

One more note before I go off to think about tentacles and, um, other stuff. I've said before that sometimes I cast my EMC stories with celebrities. Well, sometimes I cast the books I read, too. Not often, and not every character, but every now and then someone in a story will just become someone I've seen onscreen or read about somewhere else. Thus, Fraa Lio has become a wuxia Thomas Aquinas, and Fraa Arsibalt is Oliver Platt.