I think Reamde is my new favorite Stephenson book, for the mere reason that it was just so readable. That said, it's also SO LONG! The feeling when reading this book was a weird juxtaposition of not wanting to put it down, and also sometimes just not caring about picking it back up. I ran into that big time when I took a break from reading and eventually had to restart from the beginning six months later when I got back to it. It's such a long book and I don't want to get into spoiler territory, so I'll try not to say too much. I do have the feeling that this was kind of one and a half books and the one that didn't quite get finished was probably the book I was more interested in reading. I wish there'd been more of that but the zillion action scenes that made up the completed book portion of it all were well executed and the characters were almost all really well developed and wonderful to spend time with.