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Apostate

if all belief in God, Allah, Krishna, the Great Spirit, and Moloch was to disappear thanks to a sudden embrace of science, Science would become a religion

Category error.

Mike Schilling

In Anathem, Mathematics is a religion, with a priesthood, and its most devout adherents live cloistered lives in places very much like monasteries

They're called "upper division math classes", and they're unlike monasteries only in that occasionally you might see a female walk past the doorway.

Ken Muldrew

Rituals based on numbers are simple enough to imagine, but I'm having trouble coming up with anything mathy that would work. Maybe that's reason enough to get the book (although I don't remember having to look up a lot of words with The Name of the Rose (other than latin, at least)).

Bourbaki is very much a cloistered world, but it's actually kind of anti-ritual in that everything is generalized to the max and formalized not quite to the extent of Russell and Whitehead, but still well past the point of mind-numbing cruelty. Some people love it, though; everyone else thinks of it as intentionally opaque...so I guess the parallel with medieval monks is pretty obvious in that respect.

I see from Stevenson's vlog intro that the main character is named Erasmus. My older brother lives in his namesake's old rooms. May make a nice Christmas gift with a connection like that.

Ken Muldrew

Rituals based on numbers are simple enough to imagine, but I'm having trouble coming up with anything mathy that would work. Maybe that's reason enough to get the book (although I don't remember having to look up a lot of words with The Name of the Rose (other than latin, at least)).

Bourbaki is very much a cloistered world, but it's actually kind of anti-ritual in that everything is generalized to the max and formalized not quite to the extent of Russell and Whitehead, but still well past the point of mind-numbing cruelty. Some people love it, though; everyone else thinks of it as intentionally opaque...so I guess the parallel with medieval monks is pretty obvious in that respect.

I see from Stevenson's vlog intro that the main character is named Erasmus. My older brother lives in his namesake's old rooms. May make a nice Christmas gift with a connection like that.

Thomas

Nope, it's what you think: hoops all the way down.

Kathleen Maher

I always thought worship came first, rituals second.

Dawn

I bought Anathem when it was released, on faith because I loved The Baroque Cycle, but have not had the energy to start it yet. When I saw in the cover blurb that it involved a whole imaginary world and language I knew it was going to take a lot of dedication. I will have time over the holidays to get into it. I'm not a big fan of imaginary worlds in general, but I will give it a try since I already plunked down my $25.

Glad to know I can come back and get your comments on it as I dive in!

Dawn

I bought Anathem when it was released, on faith because I loved The Baroque Cycle, but have not had the energy to start it yet. When I saw in the cover blurb that it involved a whole imaginary world and language I knew it was going to take a lot of dedication. I will have time over the holidays to get into it. I'm not a big fan of imaginary worlds in general, but I will give it a try since I already plunked down my $25.

Glad to know I can come back and get your comments on it as I dive in!

burritoboy

Don't pay too much attention to Name of the Rose:

1. Eco got his Aristotle wrong

2. No medieval library (in Western Europe at least) was even remotely as large as the one in the novel. The Vatican library, the largest by far in Western Europe, only had 3,500 volumes in 1481. The first post-Roman Empire stand-alone library building was the papal library built in 1587. (There were buildings which contained library rooms, of course, but not buildings which were just libraries).

3. It's a very upper-class monastery - besides the extensive buildings, the gigantic library, the monks from all over Europe - these would have been very sophisticated men, quite adept and advanced at scholastic philosophy, and Eco portrays many of them as idiots. Go try reading someone like Ptolemy of Lucca (prior of an Italian monastery) or Albertanus of Brescia (an Italian lawyer living not too far from the location of the novel) and tell me idiocy was widespread then.

Mike

Anathem really busts loose in a bit. In the end, I think it's one of the least claustrophobic novels I've read. And don't worry about memorizing the vocab. After a while, it becomes second nature.

I read it in fits and spurts with a baby sleeping in my lap, and was able to mostly keep track of things in spite of the frequent interruptions. I'm not saying everybody will find it to be their cup of tea, but I dug it very much.

Tehanu

I'm looking forward to "Anathem" -- waiting now for my son to finish it -- but I sincerely hope it's nothing like "The Name of the Rose," which I thought was the most overrated "mystery" I've ever read. I loathe literary writers who slum in the genre fields, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, hell, even Westerns -- because to them it IS slumming, and it shows. They don't know how the genre they've deigned to try works, but they think they're better writers than genre writers because they read a lot of Camus and can quote Susan Sontag. For all I know Eco may be a genius, but as a mystery writer he was a complete flop.

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