I remember there's an episode in The Princess Bride where Goldman interrupts Morgenstern and says “At this point there's a long section about [I forget what] that I cut out because it isn't important to the plot, except that along the way Fezzik obtains a Holocaust Cloak, and I'm only mentioning it because I don't want you to wonder where the Holocaust Cloak came from.”

I would have liked to have seen something like that in Anathem: two sentences along the lines of “Then we had to get to Siberia by driving an APC over the North Pole, but the less said about that the better” and then the book moves on.