The shameless glee with which this book flings itself down and just rolls around in its own piles of geekiness is infectious, and the way it's sad and hilarious and tragic just adds spice.


You've nailed it :D Cryptonomicon is one of my favorite books EVER. It's just fantastically rich and the absurd coincidences are no more absurd than the thousand ways all the characters fail and life fails them, cause life is really like that.

I've read the book so many times, but I never fail to get sucked in and read hundreds of pages before I put it down. Goto escaping from Golgotha has got to be one of the most hyperventilation-inducing descriptions I've ever read. Stephenson, for all his geekitude, doesn't shy away from complex, intimate relationships between his characters, and I love that.