I mentioned awhile back that I received Neal Stephenson’s Anathem for my birthday. This is his latest novel, a monstrous tome that weighs in at nearly 1000 pages, and was released in the latter half of last year. Early reviews seemed really lukewarm to me, in part because of the reveal that Stephenson employs a large invented vocabulary—which often seems to be a crutch or gimmick in the hands of inexperienced writers (not that Stephenson is one)—and in part because it seemed like following up The Baroque Cycle would be really, really hard.

Well, forget all that. Anathem is a fantastic book, and Stephenson’s best to date. Not only has he matured as a writer (leaps and bounds past his earlier works), he’s put together a tightly-plotted, internally consistent story that’s just dripping with good ideas and has at least one jaw-dropping, mind-blowing concept that, well, becomes a key plot point.

And, this book actually comes to a solid, satisfying conclusion—one of the major criticisms I’ve had with his earlier works.

It’s simply a joy to read, and I actually wanted to re-read it almost as soon as I’d finished. That’s a difficult trick to pull off.

And just like that, winter is officially over and spring has arrived. No one’s told the weather, yet, but it’ll figure it out sooner or later.

I think this past month has been my worst non-blogging streak at this blog to date. Sorry about that. I’ve actually jotted down notes here and there of things to write about but have just been—frankly—too lazy to make the effort to get them down.

I’ve been porting over my Brew Site blog to run on WordPress, as promised, and it’s been mostly painless. The biggest effort was mapping the database fields and writing the SQL to convert the data from the old tables to the WordPress tables… which turns out to be not that big a deal. Actually, that wasn’t the biggest effort; the biggest effort was creating the theme to more-or-less match what I had before. It’s mostly done, good enough for government work anyway, though I’ll still be twiddling around with it for a while and I already have ideas for something new.

Next I’ll convert Hack Bend over and finally this blog. Those conversions should go quicker now that I have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done. I’m pretty sure I’m going to open Hack Bend up to multiple contributors. Who wants to write for it? It’s all free, of course, at least until I can figure out how to enable different Google AdSense users.

That’s all for tonight. Next post: a review of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.