Reamde by Neal Stephenson

I have never read a book by Neil Stephenson, but has long been an author on my radar; mostly because my mate Brian raves about him, so when I saw Reamde in the Kindle Spring sale for the bargain price of £0.99 I thought it was time to give this author a go… Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea!

Cover

From the extraordinary Neal Stephenson comes an epic adventure that spans entire worlds, both real and virtual.

The black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, former draft dodger and successful marijuana smuggler Richard Forthrast amassed a small fortune over the years–and then increased it a thousandfold when he created T’Rain. A massive, multibillion-dollar, multiplayer online role-playing game, T’Rain now has millions of obsessed fans from the U.S. to China. But a small group of ingenious Asian hackers has just unleashed Reamde–a virus that encrypts all of a player’s electronic files and holds them for ransom–which has unwittingly triggered a war that’s creating chaos not only in the virtual universe but in the real one as well. Its repercussions will be felt all around the globe–setting in motion a devastating series of events involving Russian mobsters, computer geeks, secret agents, and Islamic terrorists–with Forthrast standing at ground zero and his loved ones caught in the crossfire

Firstly, let me begin by saying this is a mammoth piece of literature, which makes me glad that I have a Kindle, and didn’t have to walk around carrying a 1042 page book.

Secondly let me announce that this is the first book in a couple of years that I just could not bring myself to finish! Perhaps if it was shorter I would have continued, but after trudging through the mire of the first 200 pages and finding the plot moving about as quickly as a tortoise in a marathon I just couldn’t bear the thought of working my way through the last 800+ pages of this tome.

Of course I am not going to say that REAMDE was a terrible novel, it just wasn’t one for me.

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Author: WH Winegarden

Like most people one day Wesley will die. Until then, he spends his days drinking coffee, messing around in the kitchen, supporting his beloved West Ham United,watching the telly, trying to figure out politics and listening to Spotify playlists... and on the days he is at work watching trains under the ground. Wesley also watches too many films, occasionally reads a book, and works in his garden. Wesley is also a keen father to his two little princesses, and a slave to his wife.

What do you think?