Do Not Reamde

Reamde - Neal Stephenson
2011 - William Morrow

Click to buy

Lot of hype, as usual, with this latest of Stephenson release. And yet another big book. For me though, this is my very first Stephenson book. Looking at his high points, Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, I am surprised I hadn't tried him sooner. BUT, after my first foray into this particular book, I'm pretty sure I need to use my limited reading time for a different author.
     I have a general yet malleable rule with regards to reading: after the first hundred or so pages, if the book hasn't grabbed me, I am done. I gave Stephenson well over 200 pages and I had to give up. Nothing about the start to this rather characteristically large tome was engaging, the characters or the writing. The plot was the strongest element but even that seemed a bit of a stretch.


Amazon description - In 1972, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, fled to the mountains of British Columbia to avoid the draft. A skilled hunting guide, he eventually amassed a fortune by smuggling marijuana across the border between Canada and Idaho. As the years passed, Richard went straight and returned to the States after the U.S. government granted amnesty to draft dodgers. He parlayed his wealth into an empire and developed a remote resort in which he lives. He also created T’Rain, a multibillion-dollar, massively multiplayer online role-playing game with millions of fans around the world.


But T’Rain’s success has also made it a target. Hackers have struck gold by unleashing REAMDE, a virus that encrypts all of a player’s electronic files and holds them for ransom. They have also unwittingly triggered a deadly war beyond the boundaries of the game’s virtual universe—and Richard is at ground zero.

Racing around the globe from the Pacific Northwest to China to the wilds of northern Idaho and points in between, Reamde is a swift-paced thriller that traverses worlds virtual and real. Filled with unexpected twists and turns in which unforgettable villains and unlikely heroes face off in a battle for survival, it is a brilliant refraction of the twenty-first century, from the global war on terror to social media, computer hackers to mobsters, entrepreneurs to religious fundamentalists. Above all, Reamde is an enthralling human story—an entertaining and epic page-turner from the extraordinary Neal Stephenson.