I never finished the Baroque Trilogy, but finished Anathem in a week and then reread it a couple years later. Despite loving everything else Stephenson wrote, The Baroque Cycle felt like pulling my own teeth, with rare interjections of fun storytelling and compelling plots. It dragged me through the first book and almost to the end of the second, but I burned out and never returned. I still sometimes think about Anathem's quantum reality interpretation, how it compares to Dune's golden path, and the implications of being able to visualize such things such that you can affect them within the remaining set of probabilities.