From the Bookshelf of The Sword and Laser…

Reamde

Neal Stephenson

Start date: September 19, 2011

Finish date: November 17, 2011

Discussion: 2011 Reads

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2011 Reads

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What Members Thought

Sep 15, 2011 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it liked it

Shelves: sci-fi-fantasy, read2011, sword-and-laser

I know, I know. When Stephenson writes really smart, I get annoyed while I force myself to finish the book (Quicksilver). When he writes a (sometimes) action-packed crime novel full of terrorists and international espionage and virtual worlds (Reamde), I get stuck near page 100 or 200 and allow myself to be talked into pushing onward, and start regretting it around page 700, and feel annoyed when I finally finish.

Here's the thing. I like a fun crime novel. I read all the Stieg Larsson books. I ...more

123 likes · Like · see review

Apr 27, 2018 Brian rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: on-kindle, goodreads-deals, on-audiobook-audible

(3.5) was 4.0 till interminable and inevitable gun battle

Arthur Miller something something gun must kill later. There are loads of guns here and they eventually deliver. Earlier portions of the book were far more interesting in that Stephensonesque over-explained and over-analyzed sort of way.

Fun, though. A decent listen as well, though probably hard to track all of the parties toward the end. Who was where when and whom did they see? He kept using the technique of following a set of characters ...more

5 likes · Like · see review

Sep 01, 2011 Eric rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audiobooks, action-adventure-thriller, favorites, neal-stephenson, 1000-page-tomes

This book is an engaging, globe-trotting techno-thriller adventure with some of my now all-time favorite characters -- Billionaire game-designer Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, Hungarian hacker Csongor, former Spetsnaz agent Sokolov, MI6 operative Olivia Halifax-Lin, Massachussets-born CIA agent Seamus Costello, and all-time great antagonist Welsh-African jihadist Abdallah Jones.

There aren't too many books I've read in the 1,000 page range -- The Lord of the Rings, The Stand, The Wise Man's Fear, and ...more

4 likes · Like · see review

May 26, 2012 travelgirlut rated it really liked it

Shelves: computers

I put off reading this book for a long time because it's the last Neal Stephenson book I had to read and I didn't want all the amazing to end. But I couldn't put it off any longer. Thankfully the book is incredibly long, so I got to stretch out the reading of it for a long time also. This book is somewhat like his other cyberpunk books, but there is definitely more going on in the action department here. Much more action/adventure than cyberpunk. I didn't mind. I found this a fun read from begin ...more

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Jul 04, 2012 Endeavour Award rated it it was ok

Shelves: science-fiction-fantasy, thriller

Despite how it's marketed, I don't think this is science fiction. It's a thriller.

A so-so one. I wouldn't have finished it except that I was assigned to it for the Endeavour Award, which I am one of the preliminary readers for.

Very interesting conceit with the Reamde virus, but that plot line fizzled once it had served its purpose about 1/3 the way through the book -- it would have been a much better book if he had continued to explore Reamde and its impact on the game world, and the resulting ...more

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Aug 22, 2013 Steve Coughlan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: scifi

I love Stephenson. Everything he's ever written. I like to classify him in my mind as a scifi author, even though his piece in Wired on the internet many years ago was the best magazine article I've ever read. But I can't call this scifi. It's pure thriller. And like all great thrillers, it's hard to put it down once you start. Which in this case was hard because I went old-school hardcover (all 1044 pages), which is heavy. Maybe I'm getting old and jaded, but I saw some things coming (so the ex ...more

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May 23, 2011 Otis Chandler rated it it was amazing

Shelves: thriller, geek, virtual-worlds

This sounds awesome.

1 like · Like · see review

Jul 28, 2011 Brittany rated it really liked it

Shelves: sciencefiction

I read a review of this book which said this is Stephenson's most "accessible" novel to date. And that was meant as a bad thing. I don't really understand this attitude that books that are easy to understand ("accessible") are necessarily bad. I don't like poorly-written, simply plotted, shallow books, but just because something is relatively easy to follow doesn't make it bad, even if it's a Neal Stephenson novel. REAMDE is, indeed most likely Stephenson's most "accessible" novel to date. But I ...more

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Oct 27, 2011 Elizabeth added it

Man this book took up a lot of my life. Strangely, my favorite part about this book was not the 100 page gun fight at the Canadian border, but the evocation of the online world of the role-playing game T'Rain--especially the way that game characters whose owners were off doing something important in the real world would revert to default behaviors of sleeping and aimless shuffling. A nice reversal of the disengagements of modern life: our avatars are alienated from each other while we humans rec ...more

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Oct 11, 2011 Jlawrence rated it liked it

Shelves: sword-and-laser

Stephenson doing a modern day techno-thriller. It had some great characters, and a few really fun Stephenson-y ideas -- mostly dealing with the book's imaginary MMORPG T'Rain -- but multiple implausibilities that could have been overlooked in a brisk potboiler ultimately detached me from the overlong story. ...more

1 like · Like · see review