Bonus Content
Reamde
PART I Nine Dragons
THE FORTHRAST FARM Northwest Iowa
Thanksgiving
Richard kept his head down. Not all those cow pies were frozen, and the ones that were could turn an ankle. He’d limited his baggage to a carry-on, so the size 11s weaving their way among the green-brown mounds were meshy black cross-trainers that you could practically fold in half and stuff into a pocket. He could have gone to Walmart this morning and bought boots. The reunion, however, would have noticed, and made much of, such an extravagance.
Two dozen of his relatives were strung out in clumps along the barbed-wire fence to his right, shooting into the ravine or reloading. The tradition had started as a way for some of the younger boys to blow off steam during the torturous wait for turkey and pie. In the old days, once they’d gotten back to Grandpa’s house from Thanksgiving church service and changed out of their miniature coats and ties, they would burst out the doors and sprint half a mile across the pasture, trailed by a few older men to make sure that matters didn’t get out of hand, and shoot .22s and Daisies down into the crick. Now grown up with kids of their own, they showed up for the re-u with shotguns, hunting rifles, and handguns in the backs of their SUVs.
The fence was rusty, but its posts of Osage orange wood were unrotted. Richard and John, his older brother, had put it up forty years ago to keep livestock from straying down into the crick. The stream was narrow enough that a grown man could cross it with a stride, but cattle were not made for striding, or bred for intelligence, and could always contrive some way to get themselves into terrible straits along its steep, crumbling banks. The same feature made it an ideal firing range. Summer had been dry and autumn cold, so the crick was running low under a paper-thin glaze of ice, and the bank above it threw up gouts of loose dirt wherever it stopped a bullet. This made it easy for the shooters to correct their aim. Through his ear protectors, Richard could hear the voices of helpful onlookers: “You’re about three inches low. Six inches to the right.” The boom of the shotguns, the snap of the .22s, and the pow, pow, pow of the semiautomatic handguns were reduced to a faint patter by the electronics in the hearing protectors—hard-shell earmuffs with volume knobs sticking out of them—which he’d stuffed into his bag yesterday, almost as an afterthought.
From the book REAMDE: A Novel by Neal Stephenson. Copyright © 2011 by Neal Stephenson. Reprinted with permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Reamde
New York Times bestselling author Neal Stephenson returns to the edgy terrain of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon to deliver Reamde, his most accessible novel yet—a high-stakes thriller that leads readers through the looking glass and into the dark heart of imagination.
Four decades ago, Richard Forthrast amassed an enormous and illegal fortune smuggling high-grade marijuana across the Canadian border into Idaho. With plenty of time and money to burn, he became addicted to an online fantasy game in which opposing factions battle for power and treasure in a vast cyber realm. Like many serious gamers, Richard began purchasing viral gold pieces and other desirables from Asian gold farmers—professional players who accumulated virtual armaments to sell to American and European buyers.
For Richard, the game was the perfect opportunity to launder his aging hundred dollar bills and begin his own high-tech start up—a venture that has morphed into a Fortune 500 computer gaming group with its own mega-successful MMORPG, T’Rain. But the line between fantasy and reality becomes dangerously blurred when a young gold farmer accidentally triggers a virtual war for dominance—and Richard is caught at the center.
Hardcover : 1056 pages
Publisher: William Morrow & Co, Inc/Imp Of Har ( September 01, 2011 )
Item #: 13-443528
ISBN: 9780061977961
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25 inches
Product Weight: 35.0 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Compelling read, but less thoughtful than previous 
April 18, 2012
Stephenson is great. The Baroque Cycle is literary, historically accurate (and inaccurate) to a fault. Cryptonomicon is literature, no book better capturing turn of the millenium America.
REAMDE is, in contrast, straight fun. There a point in the book where a major character says he's glad, ironically, to be forced to take a break from the hustle of life, and one can't help but wonder if Stephenson is taking the same sort of break from research. Beyond the ubiquity of Wal-Mart and the Internet, here's no real social commentary in this book. The villians are, painfully, simply terrorists (not, say, in Crypt~, at least historical Nazis). The characters are on an unending space ride through, what, five or more countries, with more than the requisite gunplay, fighting, and extreme explosions. The book's realistic in that Stephenson-esque, well-researched way, but there's just no real depth, no clear purpose for taking *this* character *there* as readers might expect.
That's not to say it isn't horribly compelling. I left the book out of state by accident for a week, and caught myself wondering what would happen next, like a junkie without his dealer. The characters are more than memorable; the attention to their psyches ensures that they're not just memorable, but model-able. You come to *know* them as you read. There's also a gleeful, pranksterish attention to symmetry throughout, which, though it becomes at times a nearly predictable trope, manages not to become tired.
REAMDE is a well crafted, highly enjoyable, page-turning book. Just know that, like RF, you'll be happy to turn your brain off almost completely as you read it. That makes it one of Stephenson's lesser compositions, perhaps, but it's still well worth the read.
Reviewer: Ruffin
Intricately Woven and Awesomely Entertaining
November 18, 2011
Stephenson is fantastic with the technical side of his stories, has great character development, excellent historical referencing, and completely fascinating and twisty plots. Reamde is as good as his 'Cryptonomicon', another favorite of mine. I loved this story. His writing is dense and sometimes takes some careful reading which I appreciate. I always feel smarter after I've read his work because he includes so much information from a variety of sources as part of his story, and he shows so many different perspectives with his characters.
Reviewer: Gina H
Another great story from Stephenson
November 09, 2011
Mr. Stephenson is one of my favorite writers, his stories are well written and I find myself not being able to put down any of his books. This one was no different. Excellent story line, memorable characters, and a wild ride around the world, all because of a computer virus! A little tough to get into at first, but well worth the read.
Reviewer: Lee C
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