9/10

Now an all time favorite book, though I'm definitely a little bit crazier than when I started reading it... Review to follow.

I had been warned about this book. It's big. And complicated. And bizarre. And it if it was my first Neal Stephenson book I don't think I could have done it. Please don't start with this book. Go get Snow Crash or The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Start there. Ease yourself in.

Because this book really is a mindfuck. It skips between various times with no warning. Once you get the hang of it, and start learning the characters, it gets easier. Not easy, easier. As can be gathered from the title cryptography plays a very important role in this book. And it gets detailed. Not so much with modern cryptography, which while mentioned plays a backseat to the codes and processes of WWII, but that doesn't make them any simpler.

The mathematics is deep and requires a great deal of concentration for those of use not mathematically inclined, or many years out of study. And bizarre. There are no punches pulled here. It is part graphic, gory, sexual, racist (characters, not author). It is mostly set during WWII, and the ugly thoughts and ideas of those times shows through. Atrocities abounded on all sides.

This book is hard reading. Multiple times I put it down, unsure if I could finish it. But the threads started tying together, sense started to shine through, and I kept on going. I don't know if I could recommend this to anyone, as I said at the start you'd really have to already have an idea if you like Stephenson's books first. But if you do, just give it a try.

2.5 stars?

If you are really into mathematics or a cryptography enthusiast, this is the book for you. There are pages devoted to solving physics problems. I skimmed those. TL;DR. Thankfully, Stephenson is a good writer and wrote amusingly of other things too. Also, if you are an Alan Turing fan, he is an influential character in this novel and you maybe would read it for his presence.

This book, for me, was an awful lot of reading for very little joy. I'm not enamoured of WWII novels, nor am I a fan of mathematical equations and graphs in fiction, so this was a poor choice for me and I only slogged onwards because it was part of my list of popular science fiction and fantasy titles. And I stubbornly wanted to know the ending. I was engaged enough to want to sort out how the descendants of the men who participated in the war finally resolved things. I confess to being underwhelmed by the finale.

For the right reader, this would be an excellent book. I believe people who enjoyed Gravity's Rainbow might also like this.

Book number 419 of my Science Fiction & Fantasy Reading Project.

I stake the claim that this novel is the "Catch 22" of the new millennium. Smacking of Heller and borrowing somewhat from Pynchon, this novel also stakes new ground and weaves an engaging yet intricate plot. There are also many asides which encompass basic cryptographic theory, History and mechanics of modern finance and economics, Hacking methods including "Van Eck Phreaking" and EMP pulses, Music Theory, and speculations upon the future and impact information will have.

The novel weaves together 3 plots. 1 being the story of Bobby Shaftoe, a tough and guts marine during WWII who is assigned to be a security officer for the OSA, a forerunner of the CIA who handled US involvement with cryptography. The second plot is that of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a nerdy un-socialized individual whose innate skill at mathematics and pattern recognition landed him a job as a cryptographer during WWII for the OSA and jointly with Brittain's MI6, their counterpart to the OSA. The third plot is of Randy Waterhouse, Lawrence's grandson who with his business partner are trying to construct a worldwide vault of information storage and exchange which if successful will land them with untold fortunes of "fuck you money."

The plot eventually weaves around the infamous missing "nazi gold" and how much decrypting enemy messages led to the outcome of the war.

The author's voice is very sardonic yet, mirthful. There is literally a laugh-out-loud passage on every page. The opening passage is of Bobby Shaftoe composing a haiku about a truck wheeling around a corner on two wheels just about to tip over as Bobby himself is holding on for dear life to said truck as it careens around a corner on two wheels, just about to tip over. Another humorous passage involves Randy who is signing a disclaimer for a very delicate tooth extraction which only one or two orthodontic surgeons in the country would touch: "They gave Randy a bunch of forms which he signed saying something to the effect that they could put Randy into a wood chipper for all they cared and he would have no legal recourse."

All in all, a ripping good read. Stephenson actually makes data storage and finance much more entertaining than any brain candy pot-boiler we could read. I highly recommend this novel.

Where do I even begin with this monster of a book? Well, let's start with the fact that its a horribly written piece of literature. It is bursting of convoluted stories, twisted description and inorganic conversations. The limited technical knowledge of the author leads to fakeness present throughout all the branches of the story. The mixture of real historical figures such as Alan Turing and completely fictional places such as "Kinakuta" is just a major confusion at best. Jumping around different time periods and storylines after every chapter just doesn't add anything, except more confusion. The author often jumps into random stories/conversations with zero context and tries to be educational but makes a complete mess of the narrative. The amount of sexism is frightening for a book published in 1999. In my view, the best way to describe the book is as an essay of an 8th-grade nerd who wrote it quickly just before the deadline and never read it a second time.

To be fair, there are some very well written and interesting parts (such as Goto Dengo in the jungle or during the tunnel building) which could have made for a brilliant normal-sized book. Unfortunately, these moments are rare considering the length of the book. I still cannot believe the stellar reviews and "literary significance" of this complete garbage...

I enjoyed reading cryptonomicon. It is frustrating and drags a lot in many places but it is quite brilliant in the good parts. Neal Stephenson has many interesting things to say on various subjects. He does a good job of explaining the math involved in many places. I also loved the conversation between Root and Randy in the prison regarding Athena and Ares.

The characters are all essentially one-dimensional, but i loved Enoch Root and Bobby Shaftoe. All the scenes with Bobby Shaftoe are hilarious.

So even though there are some quite brilliant parts in the book i really enjoyed, it also gets quite annoying in some places. It is way too long and in the end the story just seems to stop abruptly.

I read this book and I really liked it.

I liked the book a lot, but things about it have made me develop a whole speil. The story was great, interesting historical/thrill fiction. But! He could have easily cut a good 1/3 out of the book and it would have been fine. Mr Stephenson loves taking a long way around to describe things, and to compound the problem, his characters like to take the long way around to say things too. So you have this recursive loop of masturbation.

For example in one chapter the characters are trying van eyc phreaking, apparently this is using an antenae to read the signal off of monitor cables and such to get an image. This is fine, but rather than having the characters do it, see it works, and have it established as plot point later, he decides to give us 8 pages of what is on the computer. An interesting piece about the origins of fetish, but it has nothing to do with the book. The whole book was full of this stuff. I just wanted to yell shut the hell up and get on with the story!

Also if there is a clever way of saying something he goes out of his way to do it, for example he calls sunburns, radiation burns. While true, it doesn't come off as clever, just one of those science geek things where they wink and whisper, "Most people don't know sunight is radiation! hehe we are smart!" Granted he assumes that the reader is in on the joke, but it still bugged me.

Which is all too bad, I liked the storyline a lot, it was interesting, the way he went from WWII to the present was nicely done. His descriptions of how crypto and counter crypto both then an now were interesting as well.

I was talking to another friend of mine about this and he agreed only about another one of his books, Snowcrash, i think, and he summed it up as, "I get it, nanotech is cool, now move on with the story."

In game terms this is like playing a game of titan, it takes forever, you have fun while you are playing but you never want to play again.

This is the book that caused me to break up with Neal Stephenson. The premise is wonderful, but it completely fails to deliver. It's overlong, ponderous, and self-indulgent. The entire modern section—fully half of the book—is completely superfluous. It's uninteresting, poorly-written, and terrible science-fiction. (I'm sure it felt cutting-edge to refer to Linux and Windows NT when the book was written, but now it comes off as lame and precious.) The WWII espionage part is legitimately interesting, but only because of the parts that are true; you'd be better off reading actual histories of WWII espionage. "Operation Mincemeat" would be a great place to start.

In summary: don't waste your time. If this book sounds interesting to you, try "Declare" by Tim Powers. It's shorter, better-written, and far more interesting.

This is a failure on several levels.

Firstly, I did that This American Life offer with Audible so I could try it for a few weeks and get a free book out of the deal.

First off, Audible isn't particularly good. Though one credit generally will get you a book a month, their definition of a book can mean the first 4th of a Stephen King novel. You also lose all access to these DRM encrypted files when you drop the service, so I doubt I'll be keeping it.

The second issue is that the version of "Cryptonomicon" has a disingenuous label that you might miss if you're not paying attention. It's not unabridged, it's "unabridged excerpts", where certain chapters are summarized in a few sentences. So yeah, it's basically abridged, and severely so. It's like saying something is non-toxically poisonous.

I could forgive all of these things if the book were better.

My interest in Neal Stephenson springs almost entirely from "The Diamond Age" which I thought was a great, ambitious novel. His knack with science fiction is amazing. The trouble is "Cryptonomicon" is more or less set in the real world.

I like many books written by nerds. I like many books written about nerds. Until now I didn't really think about the fact that I don't like books written by nerds about what nerds are into.

The book is split between nerds in World War Two and nerds in the 90's, between nerds discussing cryptology and Turing Machines and nerds discussing cryptology and computers.

There's an entire chapter on a character using a library to program a realistic system to deal with how many calories people burn from eating within the main character's roleplaying game. Not an aside, not a paragraph, a chapter.

Of course the discussion of fantasy roleplaying, unix programming, complex communications microwave towers and router systems all take a backseat to the mind numbing discussion of cryptology. I dislike solving word jumbles, so this almost erotically detailed discussion of code breaking and the math involved left me cold and alienated.

I've accepted all of these elements in other forms before without minding at all. I read Neuromancer for god sakes, but most sci fi discusses these topics while exploring a bigger issue or for the sake of advancing the plot. In "Cryptonomicon" all this nerd fodder is just sitting there posing like a centerfold for the Asperger crowd.

I got about halfway through the audiobook before an extended conversation about ethics and routers ultimately killed my patience. This book is some of the most masturbatory nerd porn I've ever read.

I'll probably pick up other Neal Stephenson books, but I'm going to have to start reading the first chapter to make sure it in no way resembles this.

Neal Stephenson is brilliant. Quite obviously so. And one of his strengths lies in writing books that make abstruse, convoluted niche subjects feel approachable and exciting to the average reader. His attention to detail and his playful tangents, asides and divagations are charming, witty and often fascinating.

Unfortunately this does not always translate into well-written and well-structured narratives. To put it mildly, Cryptonomicon drags. It meanders. Occasionally it stops completely dead. More than a hundred pages before the end all the surprises and brilliance had been squandered and I was gritting my teeth and just waiting for it to be over.

This is a very male narrative. All of the main characters are straight males, and the book (and its characters) are obsessed with male ejaculations (yes, explicitly) and their effect on the male thought process. Furthermore, Stephenson includes some facile pop psychology about the interactions of the the sexes (which made this homosexual roll his eyes) and took a few embarrassing swipes at academia, atheism and gender equality. The fact that two of the male supporting characters are homosexual does not lessen this impression of male heteronormativity, especially when you realize that both of these characters are doomed to lonely, loveless deaths.

Women are cast only in the most stereotypical roles and are never completely fleshed out. They are either sex objects, sex tyrants, frigid or helpless--nothing in between. Out of all the many, many orgasms in the book, only two belong to women (or rather, A woman) and they are presented in such a way as to make them sound unnatural and almost frightening.

I'm not sure what Stephenson's point was in writing such a heavy-handed, gender-unbalanced narrative, but it alienated me almost completely. Maybe I'm missing the point--I'm sure there are people who would say I am--but it just didn't work for me.

So! In conclusion, Cryptonomicon was a lengthy slog that could have used tighter editing and plotting, and far less fixation on reinforcing gender and sexual norms.

A must-read