"Anathem" is really good. Here's a quote, from a wandering math-monk trying to make sense of his new outdoorsman friend's strangely irrational and exciting way of life, as compared to the irrationally boring way of life followed by most people who are not outdoorsmen or math-monks:

"Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't life without story had been driven into the concents [math-monk collectives] or into jobs like Yul's [weird solitary journeymen]. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part?"

How indeed.