This is a terrible way to assess books honestly, usually because adaptations are usually garbage compared to the actual books simply due to time constraints.
Well, then you didn't do it right. The TV show is garbage, the books were sublime (although like LoTR, their pacing was backloaded, so you had to suffer though the first half of each book. The third book is more uniformly paced).
Children of Time is nothing like Anathem, but both are so, so bad. CoT was good for about a hundred pages, and then I just got sick of spiders berating each other. Quit around the midpoint.
