A thousand-page thriller with essays on spy training and economy of MMOs. This is Neal Stephenson, all right! 
 His books do make for good brain candy - some new speculative or descriptive idea on modern technology to wrap your head around. Reamde doesn't seem to focus on that as much as say, Anathema or Snow Crash, and instead more on the 'thriller' aspect instead of the 'philosophy of science and technology', and it is not quite as enjoyable. 
 Although it must be said that Stephenson does have a gift for making thousand-page bricks fun. His endings, as usual, are profoundly unsatisfying, and I would have preferred 20 pages on Chinese firewalls instead.