In my review for Seveneves, I said that the book was “the result of a brilliant writer surrounded by editors unwilling or unable to tell him to stop, rewrite, condense, or anything else an editor is supposed to do with a book.” Further, and in summarising my feelings about the book, I wrote: I genuinely love Neal Stephenson books, but as he has gotten older, his books have gotten progressively longer, and my ability to stick with his particular Neal Stephenson-specific style of writing has gotten tricky. In that time I have read and reviewed dozens of other books – including another Neal Stephenson book, his 2015-published Seveneves, reviewed here. So, eight years after I first started reading Reamde, I have finally finished it. Unfortunately, within minutes of picking Reamde back up off the shelf, I realised that I had no memory of the first half of the book – only impressions of mayhem in a small Chinese city.

In fact, a bookmark had been sitting close to halfway through the mammoth 1,000-page behemoth for nearly a decade. I was 30 pages into Neal Stephenson’s Fall, or Dodge in Hell when I came across the word “T’rain” and I remembered that a) this book was a sequel from Stephenson’s 2011 Reamde and b) I had never finished reading Reamde.

Neal stephenson reamde review