I actually was wondering for a bit if thats where the story was going, that the characters would themselves turn out to be video-game characters, and T’Rain would be a game-within-a-game. But the characters do a lot of things that would make for pretty boring video gaming (go to family reunions, visit walmart, live in Canada, etc.) so I’m guessing thats not the case
But the plot revolves around gold farming, which is an aspect of gaming every bit as boring as, say, living in Canada. 
I just finished it a couple of hours ago, and basically while I cant fault any of the criticisms leveled, I found it was a very enjoyable book. One , like crypto I will re read at a later time.
Declan
I just finished it a couple of days ago.
One thing that not just a few core Neal Stephenson fans will find disappointing is that this is not a typical N.S. book full of grand ideas and insightful observations. So it’s not like anything he’s done since Snowcrash, but instead harkens to stories like The Big U and Zodiac. I feel, and maybe this is just me, but perhaps this project was something that he had on the back burner for a long time but by the time he got around to writing it all out, nothing he had to say about MMORPGs was fresh and interesting anymore, so instead he just told a simple action story with the MMORPG as a plot driver.
[spoiler]The terrorists are, for the most part, just one-dimensional archetypes of Islamic terrorists in that they don’t do much except eat, shoot and plan mayhem (they might spend some free time randomly scowling, attempted raping and praying to Allah too). The only actually scary terrorist, that isn’t easy prey to a young girl, or other plot device, is a western educated one that can therefore communicate with other characters. What are the chances! But I can live with that, the story needs it. And to be fair, N.S. does deal with language difficulties better in this novel than most writers do.
I particularly didn’t like they way the writer matched up romantic interests at the drop of a hat. It was like he was running a dating service sponsored by Brown Fever Intrigue Inc.
At the beginning I also didn’t much care for the main character Richard who came across as a bit of a skeevy pedophile when he takes umbrage with a young man escorting his adopted niece Zula to a family event. And then later when he hipocrytically impugnes the same young man for doing business with shady types (not that he himself would have ever done such a thing when he was a young man trafficking drugs across national borders!). It’s clear he has a bias against the guy simply because he’s romantically involved with his cute adopted niece. Awesome.
But anyway, that’s a character trait, not necessarily a fault in the writing.
Lastly, it was the technical details about firearms that slowed my reading down somewhat. It’s seems he really wants us all to know that a 12 gauge shotgun will match up against 9 mil. pistol only when the round is already cycled and there is ground cover to hide your movement, and provided that there isn’t anyone with an AR scoped semiauto within 100 yards in a clear line of sight who isn’t already targeted by a 303 soft-shell riffle. O.K. Thanks for the information Rambo, but I heard it the last few times you said it.
What I did like were the side stories into the creation of the MMORPG and the frictions between the creative people for responsible for the game itself. He created those characters well, and told their stories well enough to let you imagine them in a satisfying way. [/spoiler]
[quote=“Reno_Nevada, post:34, topic:597712”]
If the second one is me, this is the point that I was trying to make. It seems to me that in *REAMDE *Stephenson is trying to reduce that quintessential Stephensonness, possibly to appeal to a wider range of readers.
By the way, another contrast between *Cryptonomicon *and REAMDE. In the former, the good guys were money launderers and supported terrorists. In the latter, while the good guys still seem to do a lot of money laundering, they now combat terrorists.
I liked that aspect too. And did you also notice the similarities? Old, tired men walking to their fate on staves of wood, likened to wizards. It happened at the climax of Cryptonomicon and this time in both the real world and the game world. 
I had a bath and then remembered that I forgot to add a summation.
Would I read it again? - No.
Would I recommend it to fellow readers? - No.
Just finished this one, so a bump for the thread to see if others have polished it off in the meantime, and / or what those above might think about the book 6 months on.
Very disappointing book for me. It’s certainly no hardship to read it - it’s NS afterall, but what a strikingly generic read that was. You could go into the thriller section of your local bookstore and get 50 books like this. Nothing wrong with airport thrillers, but I’m certain no one here picks up a NS book on this basis. For NS, who’s renowned for his vision, this is heavy criticism. Given that readme also comes with the usual NS bloat issues, and you start to chafe a bit at the opportunity cost of reading a shit book.
I wouldn’t normally bump a thread just to say something negative, but I’m really surprised at how poor this book is and wonder if there is an explanation along the lines of what **Isamu ** suggested. Ten years ago MMORPGs weren’t really well known outside of hardcore gamers (ISTM) - the idea of gold-farming and making real money from such a game certainly wasn’t - it would have sounded cool and unusual. In readme though it just didn’t have the creative oomph to power a book in the way NS usually excels at.
I pretty much agree with Isamu’s last post, and also with your’s, Busy Scissors.
As a gamer, I got the feeling that Stephenson isn’t one, that he just did some basic research and then started writing. And yeah, if he had written that in 2000, it might have come off better, but as it was, it was had a real “late to the party” feel to it.
Also, it was just waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long. I was pretty damned bored by the halfway point, but I kept reading to see if there was gonna be some awesomeness later (there wasn’t).
So far, pretty much everything I’ve read by Stephenson except Snow Crash and some of his early short stories has disappointed me.
I liked it. As I said way upthread, I seem to really like Stephenson for some reason. But, yes, it was clear he was trying to un-Stephensonize this one as much as possible for some reason, and for fans of Stephenson, that’s not a good thing. It really was a pretty generic action techno-thriller. And I admit his views on how a WoW style game can and should work are pretty embarrassingly unrealistic. And I say that as a complete non-gamer.
I still haven’t got around to reading it (after starting this thread almost a year ago). It’s been relegated to ‘will pick it up at the library if I can remember’ after reading the reactions here.
Hard to call that thick of a book lightweight, but Malthus is right on target. I had fun with Reamde, but reading Stephenson is always a pleasure. After the heights he achieved with Anathem, however, this came as a real let down. Kind of like Kubrick directing a summer popcorn flick.
Agreed with the disappointment. I got several hundred pages in and put it down.
Same thing with **Haruki Murakami’s **recent book **1Q84 **- similar in many ways to the works of his I love, but missing an essential something that makes it worth digging into such a long book.
Finally got around to reading it. After the disappointments of the Baroque Cycle and Anathem, didn’t really want to hurry into it. I prefer the Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon Stephenson rather than the later guy.
Anyway …
Stephenson, years ago, wrote a couple of generic spy thriller books with his uncle under the pseudonym of Stephen Bury. I read one of them, The Cobweb.
Reamde is pretty much the same style and everything. He should have slapped the old pseudonym on it.
Disappointing in lack of cyber or SF elements. There’s the game T’Rain and some really pointless filler about how it came about, but that actually gets in the way rather than complements the story.
It was particularly pathetic in the creation of many of the characters. It’s like the classic Chinese menu method of creating a character. Pick a trait from Column A, one from Column B, etc. Olivia in particular is exactly the type of character bad writers create.
Suffers from a classic Stephenson pacing problem: Major characters disappear from the story for hundreds of pages. By the time they finally turn up again, you’ve mostly forgotten who they were and what they had been up to.
Incredibly dissatisfying ending. Lots of ways the post-climax stuff could have been handled and it … wasn’t.
It’s trudge and nothing more. Waste of time to read it.
I am wondering if it is worth it to do The Mongoliad. Checking Amazon reviews. Oh boy. Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon and Anathem are all 4 stars. Well, so much for trusting those people.
(FtGKid2 had said it was good. So I read it. I asked last weekend why on Earth …? and turned out that was hearsay rather than direct information. Thanks, kid.)
I think the idea of having a game like WoW become so entwined in peoples lives and the real economy that stuff like international crime and terrorism play out partly in the game world is a pretty cool one. And judging from interviews with Stephenson before Reamde was published, and all the T’Rain stuff in the book, he thought so to.
But for some reason he didn’t write that book, and instead it turned into a mediocre thriller, with a bunch of extra stuff about an imaginary videogame that has little bearing on the plot left over as kind of a vestigial remenant of the original idea. I’m kind of interested in what happened along the way.
I found it entertaining enough to finish the whole thing.
Some of the action sequences were fantastic. And some of the other sections dragged on forever. If there is anything more boring than watching someone play a videogame, it’s reading about someone playing a video game (or in a couple of spots reading about someone watching someone playing a video game).
The descriptions of the two main designers of the video game, the world designer and the writer, were just flat out ridiculous.
It also starts out super slow.
This is the kind of thread that I am posting in mostly to emphatically agree with previous posters. I had high expectations for this, especially for what I imagined Stephenson would do with the overlap between MMORPG culture and real world culture … which ended up being completely not this book.
Reading it wasn’t awful, it was okay as far as techno thrillers go, and I enjoyed it more because of his dialogue and sense of humor. I was surprised it never turned into a novel about ideas. I was at least 3/4 through the book and still waiting for the conceptual part to show up.
I have almost completely had it with his “nerd fantasy fulfillment,” though – goofy, geeky guys with questionable hygiene who hook up with beautiful (without make-up or any effort at all), smart, sassy, non-white women who don’t make any unreasonable emotional demands on their partners.
I interpreted the title as: ream.de
Clearly a German domain.