Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

[lightreads]

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Yowza. A story about a World War II cryptographer, a marine, a Japanese engineer, and fifty years later a software entrepreneur whose work turns out to depend on all of theirs.

Tremendously long and convoluted, with a plot that, well. See, it's quite silly in places, particularly the end, but that really doesn't matter because the point of this book is not the plot. This is one of those books where you just hang on and enjoy the journey through 1100 pages of math, and phreaking, and structural engineering, and military tactics, and academia, and electronic currencies, and I could go on. The whole thing is delivered in that straight-faced absurdist style Stephenson can do until the cows come home. What I'm saying is it's a ridiculous, enormous, wandery book with no real oomph to the through line and a lot of extra baggage, but I enjoyed the hell out of every page. Even the ones that hurt to read, and there were a few of those. 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.

Ooh. That was nice. A big commitment, but yeah, that was nice.

View all my reviews >>

Comments

[ecaterin.livejournal.com]

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.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Goto escaping from Golgotha has got to be one of the most hyperventilation-inducing descriptions I've ever read

Oh my God, yes, that. I had to go out onto the balcony in the middle of that.

[ecaterin.livejournal.com]

I am not surprised! Damn, now I'm thinking of all the good scenes - the description of Randy's Cap'n Crunch ritual put me in stitches, Randy's email describing the 'someone's sending you a message' trip up the hilly willies and down the hilly willies, Waterhouse's thoughts on the masturbation conspiracy..... argh, where's my copy? Gotta read it.

[readerjane]

(flings itself down and just rolls around in its own piles of geekiness)

Ooh! I've had this on my maybe-to-read list for awhile. Sounds like I need to move it directly to the TBR list. Just read your review to Son: I might have to let him have the first turn. He's a faster reader than I (even leaving out the fact that he has way more free time), so that's okay.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough, this book put me in the mood for another one of these multiple storylines in multiple periods books, so I'm finally giving Eifelheim a shot. Pretty cool, so far.