Disclaimer: Had Mr. Stephenson been more skillful in his prose/characterization/writing in general, I would not have paid nearly as much attention to the following issues. I read a lot of old dead white guy type literature, and am pretty forgiving so long as it's good. If it isn't, well, this happens. That is all.Do not be fooled by the static nature of the star count above. If I had my way, it would be a roiling maelstrom of a typhoon crashing into lava, erosion and explosion steaming and spill...

I'm shocked by the critical acclaim this book received in the sci-fi category but I suppose even a turd can float. Two stars is really pushing it. Maybe a star for the number of laughs I got per 100 pages. This is the work of a technically inept egomaniac. He does have some technical background (he drops Unix hints and anagrams the name of a supposed deity who dies and then later comes back w/ no explanation??) However, it's not enough “savoir faire” for any of the content to make sense. It migh...

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming says, that any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. (Including Common Lisp, added Robert Morris)Lisp, to qoute L. Peter Deutsch, can make you realise that software could be close to executable mathematics.Cryptonomicon is surprisingly similar to the previous paragraph, both as an analogy to the book, and for the useless use of computer-based qoute, just fo...

Cryptonomicon.A >1000 page tech info-dump comfort read. Yes, comfort read,I think this is my fourth read of this wonderful novel and it just keeps on giving. I'm still picking up new subtleties, offhand comments that I missed, imagery that was lost on me on the last time through. There is a reason why this is one of my favourite novels and why Stephenson is my favourite author. Cryptonomicon is the story of money, value and information. Lawrence Waterhouse, a math genius, works alongside Alan Tu...

Christmas 2010: I realised that I had got stuck in a rut. I was re-reading old favourites again and again, waiting for a few trusted authors to release new works. Something had to be done.On the spur of the moment I set myself a challenge, to read every book to have won the Locus Sci-Fi award. That’s 35 books, 6 of which I’d previously read, leaving 29 titles by 14 authors who were new to me.While working through this reading list I got married, went on my honeymoon, switched career and beca

Aspire for fluency in geek speak? Is "Big Bang Theory" your idea of reality TV? Then I recommend this Moby Dick of nerd novels. Jay Clayton in his book Charles Dickens in Cyberspace calls this book the “ultimate geek novel” (pg. 204-211) and draws attention to the “literary-scientific-engineering-military-industrial-intelligence alliance” that produced discoveries in two eras separated by fifty years, World War II and the Internet age. That's a good concise summary of the book. Stephenson wr...

One day I went out shopping for a book. My list of unread, prepurchased titles sat neatly in a stack by my disused fire-place and none of them set me alive with anticipation. I don't know what I wanted really, but I had a vague idea that there was a black book with numbers on the front that was a New York Times bestseller, and I quite fancied something clever related to code breaking or numbers. So I hopped on the subway, rode into Union Square and strolled over to B&N on 17th street and found w...

Neal Stephenson likes to throw weird shit together and see if it sticks. The more recent his book, the more likely it is to resemble a schizophrenic's curio cabinet. Your average Phillip Pullman will add a little wacky trepanning to his fantasy trilogy for that refined edge of esoteria. Meanwhile, Stephenson will have an exiled member of Italian royalty who works in 'demolition real estate' and knows Escrima thanks to an intense trepanning session with Horace Walpole, Duke Orford. Which I believ...

This is my third Neal Stephenson book. You could say I'm a fan of his work. You would be correct in such a statement. But, this is not for everybody. His writing style is dense and there is a great deal of information being presented to you. More so than the intricate nature of the information is the fact that, sometimes, the author will take you down a bizarre side track that will actually make you sit there and think about what you just read. If this doesn't seem like something you'd enjoy-the...

I'm an English major. I've read a lot of books. This one, is -- hands down -- my favorite modern fiction novel. I've read it twice, recommended it to others, and I'm sure I'll read it again. There is so much to appreciate here.It is a semi-historical adventure, so there's something for fiction and non-fiction fans.The writing is justly verbose at times, and conversationally abrupt at other times. In essence, you find yourself wholly in the minds and bodies of the characters while reading every s...

Pretenses are shabby things that, like papier-mache houses, must be energetically maintained or they will dissolve. Neal Stephenson has written an overlong novel focusing on the significance of cryptography both in the world today and the time of World War II. He links the two by using multiple family generations. The predecessors inhabit the early cryptographical universe of Turing and others, dealing with cracking German and Japanese cyphers. The latter family representatives are trying to

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, is to techno-intellectuals as Bryant-Denny Stadium is to redneck college football fans: it is a monument. According to Stephenson in this very enjoyable, but lengthy book nerds won the Second World War and are keeping global society free from tyranny nowadays. Weighing in at 1168 pages, this behemoth saddles up to the literary buffet line alongside Atlas Shrugged and War and Peace. How does a book this big get published and how does an author achieve that goal m...

One of the problems when reviewing Cryptonomicon is that you could easily end up writing a short novel just trying to summarize it. Here’s my attempt to boil the story down to its essence.During World War II, Lawrence Waterhouse is a genius mathematician who is part of the effort to break Japanese and German codes, and his job is to keep them from realizing how successful the Allies have been by faking events that give the enemies reasons other than compromised codes to pin any losses on. Marine...

My friend Stuart's reading this and I stupidly started spoiling one of the best lines in the book (it pops up as Shaftoe's motto) and he was mildly irritated with me. Fortunately for him, he is vastly smarter than me so while he was quite generously acting annoyed he was probably thinking to himself, "Maybe one day I will spoil math and engineering and the details of Riemann zeta functions for Conrad." Now I'm rereading it out of sympathy and it's even better than I remembered.Anyway, while I ha...

2015 reread: In World War II, Bobby Shaftoe is a Marine, and Lawrence Waterhouse is a cryptographer. In the present, Randy Waterhouse is part of a tech start-up in the Phillipines. How are the two threads linked, other than by the mysterious Enoch Root?Okay, so this kitten squisher is a lot more complicated that but after 1200+ reviews, it's hard to come up with teasers some days.As noted above, this was not my first time reading Cryptonomicon. I first read it when it was published, way back in

*Re-reading this book, started early January 2009Note: This review is from my blog, circa 2005.I finished reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson about a week ago. It took me over a month to finish, not because it wasn't great and exciting, but because it was 937 fucking pages long! I have to say that Neal Stephenson is one of the most interesting and unique authors I have come across in some time now. The book had three main characters/story lines, and each of them had it's own strongly indepe...