I’m partway through my second read of Anathem, the one I mentioned I was starting a while back, and I want to say upfront that I did not expect to be writing this particular essay, because my whole plan going in was to confirm my original review, four stars, ending doesn’t earn its length, good but not great. About sixty percent of the way through this time, I am no longer sure I believe my own complaint.
Here’s what I think happened the first time. I read the back third of that book exhausted, genuinely worn down by the invented vocabulary and the density of the middle section, and I think I arrived at the ending wanting it to be over more than I was actually evaluating whether it worked. This time, knowing the vocabulary already, not fighting the terminology the way I was fighting it cold, the pacing of the back third reads completely differently, faster, more purposeful, like a piece of music I finally understand the structure of rather than one I’m just enduring the length of.
I don’t think this is uncommon, actually, and it’s a slightly uncomfortable thing to sit with as someone who publishes ratings professionally, or as professionally as a hobby blog counts. A first read of a genuinely dense book is partly a test of endurance, and endurance-fatigue can get misattributed to the actual quality of what you’re reading, especially near the end, when you’re most tired and least generous. I wonder now how many of my four-star “great but flawed ending” verdicts across other long, difficult books are actually verdicts about my own stamina on a first pass rather than verdicts about the book.
I want to be careful here, because I’m not walking back the whole review, the invented vocabulary complaint stands, “praxis” for technology is still doing very little work that a glossary entry couldn’t do more efficiently, and I stand by that. What I’m reconsidering specifically is the ending, which felt like a letdown after nine hundred pages the first time and now, rereading with the terminology already fluent, feels like exactly the payoff that terminology was building toward the whole time.
I don’t know yet if this ends at five stars. I’m not finished, and I want to actually finish before I decide anything rather than get swept up in reread-enthusiasm and revise a rating I might regret in a month. But I wanted to write this now, mid-reread, uncertain, because I think there’s something worth saying about how much a first impression of a hard book is really an impression of how tired you were when you finished it, and how rarely we go back and check.