An enormous collection of novels - a spy thriller, and a military farce, and a comparative history (of Showa Japan, Churchill Britain, Roosevelt America, the pre- and post-Marcos Philippines), and an oral history of computing, and a modern legal psychodrama, and a family saga of three large dynasties. And a divisive book:

1) It is extremely focussed on men and masculine mindset - guts and brutality, mathematical facility, mind-numbing horniness, how shit works, emotional impermeability, pride in being a stereotype. (Scroll down to see reviews reacting in highly exaggerated ways to this fact, with either horror or delight.)

Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time... there might be a third category... [Waterhouse] speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he's already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping that you'll join in. Which no one ever does.

On the wonder and absurdity of social etiquette:

n  The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of those bodies makes a single sound during the sultan's speech.n

Half of this is an accurate portrayal of 40s gender politics, half a defensive reaction to contemporary blank-slateism. I don't think it's a malign kind of masculinity, though there are only a couple of female characters who don't have at least peripheral or inverted sexiness - if you can't handle that I'd avoid it. A good point to bail out would be the bit where Waterhouse models the effect of masturbation vs sex on his cognition as a periodic timeseries. I'm very hard to offend, but the constant use of "females" got to me, by page 400.

n  Randy stares directly into the eyes of the female customs official and says, "The Internet." Totally factitious understanding dawns on the woman’s face, and her eyes ping bosswards. The boss, still deeply absorbed in an article about the next generation of high-speed routers, shoves out his lower lip and nods, like every other nineties American male who senses that knowing this stuff is now as intrinsic to maleness as changing flat tires was to Dad. "I hear that’s really exciting now," the woman says in a completely different tone of voice, and begins scooping Randy’s stuff together into a big pile so that he can repack it. Suddenly the spell is broken, Randy is a member in good standing of American society again, having cheerfully endured this process of being ritually goosed by the Government.n

2) It is also a partisan in the Arts vs STEM "culture war". (In fact Stephenson is often dismissive of all academia - "grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research".) One of the most important scenes in the book shows a lone techie clashing with a self-appointed jury of stereotypically appalling critical theorists: they speak nonsense about an objective matter, he correctly calls them on it, they cover him in ad hominem bulverism until he gives in. It's not without nuance: his champion in the fight Randy is later shown sulking and reliving it and admitting his own pettiness:

n  “I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped as a technocrat,” Randy said, deliberately using oppressed-person’s language maybe in an attempt to turn their weapons against them but more likely (he thinks, lying in bed at three A.M. in the Manila Hotel) out of an uncontrollable urge to be a prick.n

3) There are a lot of coincidences, much more than the novelistic baseline. Characters meet Atanasoff and Turing and Reagan and MacArthur. (A Nazi submarine captain makes a sneering reference to a bureaucratic nightmare being something out of "that Jew Kafka". I thought this was an absurd anachronism, but looking into it, the Nazi could easily have read him, but could not have made the reference to a Brit and expected it to stick. English translation of Das Schloss in 1930 but it didn't take off until after the war.) This is cute/trite on its own, but I find it helpful to imagine Stephenson looking down at history, selecting a particularly interesting sub-graph from the population

4) There are lots of info-dumps. Large sections of this are indistiguishable from nonfiction. ("This pause is called the horizontal retrace interval. Another one will occur...") People seem to hate this, but it is fine since it's done through aspie characters who absolutely do talk like that.

5) It has a lot of pulpy Feats, fuck-yeah setpieces which fiction this good usually foregoes. Tropical headhunters; escape from a collapsing mineshaft; cryptocurrency in the 90s; tactical blackface; drinking and lolling with your Nazi captors; etc.

n  It would be an idyllic tropical paradise of not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and deat each other and use human heads for decoration.n

---

It's easy to miss the uniting theme, and thus call it "not a novel" or whatever, because it only unmasks on p.791. It is Ares v Athena, rage v cunning, politics v engineering, normies v geeks, law v ethics, conflict v mistake, local maxima v the search for the global. This overloaded binary is embodied in Andrew v Randy, the Dentist v Avi, Rudy v Göring, All of Japan v Dengo.

Now, it suits me to have litigious bastards and culture-warriors be the inheritors of Ares, of mindless destruction. But it would be silly to think that the stakes are comparable between the plot strands: it's WWII vs the Struggles of Some Cool Crypto Entrepreneurs. But Stephenson is obviously not equating them, and might be pointing out that stakes are now in general lower, even when you're up against contemporary gangsters.

Another giant theme is the emergence of one new masculinity, beyond the taciturn physical hero: the geek. This is the "third category" above. (Is this really that new? Isn't it just the Scholar?)

---

Misc notes

* Waterhouse seems to be taking Bill Tutte's space in history and seizing it for America but ok.

* Bobby Shaftoe is the noblest junkie character I've ever seen - ingenious in his pursuit of morphine, but slightly more keen on Marine honour than on it.

* I was not expecting Stephenson to use converting to Christianity as the symbol for Dengo leaving sick ultranationalism behind. Compassion and liberalism are far larger and better than the Christian launchpad they happened to use, after all.

* Relatedly there's his preference for cute family-values Christianity over postmodern critical theory:

n  To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy’s fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz, society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. n

* Some surprisingly deft notes on kink and the exogenous/preconscious nature of sexuality, in the bit where they're spying on Tom Howard.

* This line accurately portrays the mindset of certain wizard types like Turing:

n  It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers.n

though it is discreditable and nongeneralisable to hold.

* I learned a lot of words.

* There are dozens and dozens of depictions of Japanese war crimes before we get any note paid to the horrendous suffering of the Japanese troops. But after that it is suitably even-handed in its tragedy. One of the saddest sentences I've ever read: "They are strafing the survivors".

* Root is a tech determinist about the war - the Allies won because their tech was better, end-of. I seriously doubt historians would go with this.

* I struggle to fit Root into the world. His death and reappearance is the only magical element in the entire thing (coincidences aside), and clashes with the main bloody theme. I am toying with the idea that Root is a collective name like James Bond, but I suppose it'll just be some switcheroo bullshit.

---

There's a lot wrong with it - it's about twice as long as it needs to be, the gender stuff is overdone, it is intentionally annoying to its outgroup, succumbing to 'conflict theory', and none of its antagonists (Loeb, the Dentist, Wing, Crocodile) are fleshed out despite him having 900 pages of opportunities for fleshing them - but it's grand, clever, full of ideas, funny, full of great setpieces, and foresaw a couple of things about our decade.

UPDATE: Oh. I get it. For the child within us all, Stephenson provides a specific genre, beautifully rendered. But he buries it within a generous amount of smart and often hilarious wanking. What better way to tackle this genre than to bury it? Brilliant: a literary trick from 1999 with which to span, and end, the 20th Century. And his "Crypt" invention eerily foretells what we now call the "dark net" (which I know about only because I subscribe to Wired magazine. Honest.) So I've added a star to my original three-star review (I haven't been blindsided by an author in years), which follows:
At heart, this is a treasure story: gold is carefully hidden in the 1940s and fifty years later the search is on. And I like this genre: Clive Cussler's "Treasure" is among my favorite treasure/thrillers. So, yes, Stephenson steps up to the plate and does deliver a huge and often fascinating plot. There are also big ideas and thought-provoking discussions. For example, a character refuses to use the term "addict" and instead uses "morphine-seeking", then explains his reason: the noun utilization of "addict" obliterates an entire person. (And how often are we all guilty of these kinds of labels even if only in thought?) Stephenson is smart, and his opening leap from preset stops of a musical organ to the way computers might work is an interesting discussion. But Stephenson seems to want to strut his stuff, he wants to throw everything in. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but when he throws in the term "quantum physics" for no apparent reason (to me at least) I question his intentions: is he writing to entertain the reader, or just wanking? The author does use this term, then oddly feels the need to explain what the term means. So on the one hand he respects his readers by writing smart, big ideas, then for some reason needs to explain "wanking". Okay, so maybe in 1999 "wanking" wasn't very popular. (The word, that is.) I did like this book, but the wild tangents had me checking out of the story on occasion. And I'm going to read more from this author, as I already have a big, beautiful hardback of "Anathem" here at home on my "to read" shelf.

“Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.”



The story takes place in two periods:

One during world war two......
a group of World War II-era Allied codebreakers and tactical-deception operatives affiliated with the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (UK), and disillusioned Axis military and intelligence figures.

The second period is in the late 1990's, during the start of the internet boom. A group of computer experts and technology innovationists, use cryptologic, telecom, and computer technology in order to……..
Hmmm......Not so clear…..
Find gold?
Create anonymous Internet banking using electronic money?
Improve their love life and financial situation?
Entertain themselves intellectually by solving mathematical and technical problems?
Improve the world?



Both the stories/periods are connected in various ways:
Some of the later characters are descendants of the previous era characters.
The later characters are involved in various enterprises that are related to events that are described in the WW2 part of the story.
Both the early and later era characters are mathematicians.


The story is rich with expressions, information and narrative related to the mathematical issues it deals with.
It mentions and describes many mathematical issues and examples related to the story, and goes into excessive details related to the hardware and mainly software that the characters use. As a person with background both in math and computers, I found it interesting, others who have less interest in this field of knowledge are probably better off skipping these detailed descriptions.

Altogether, the book has a very nerdy flavor, which is expected as most of the main characters are computer and mathematical experts.

Both the plot and the characters are well developed (well, some of the characters), and I found the reading experience exciting. Things always happen, and if not, there are interesting issues that are explained in detail in an entertaining way.

The prose style is very technical, including technical descriptions of day to day phenomena. This is part of the charm of the book:

"Blood seeps out of tiny, invisible painless cuts on Randy’s face and neck for ten or fifteen minutes after he has shaved. Moments ago, that blood was accelerating through his ventricles, or seeping through the parts of his brain that make him a conscious entity. Now the same stuff is exposed to the air; he can reach up and wipe it off. The boundary between Randy and his environment has been annihilated."

There are cases when this type of writing did get a bit on my nerve, and there were some cases where the plot did not really make sense (too many coincidences or decisions that were made or not made to benefit the plot)


The book is both amusing and thrilling. I am not sure it is for anyone, but if you are not afraid of technology and the length of the book, you should give it a try.

Some more nice quotes…..I tried to pick the short ones:

“Enoch...why are you here?
Why has my spirit been incarnated into a physical body in this world generally? Or specifically, why am I here in a Swedish forest, standing on the wreck of a mysterious German rocket plane while a homosexual German sobs over the cremated remains of his Italian lover?”


“It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words—are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?”

“Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank.”

“...the insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an unforgeable guarantee of freshness.”

“Even though he grew up in churches, raised by church people, Waterhouse (as must be obvious by this point) never really understood their attitudes about sex. Why did they get so hung up on that one issue, when there were others like murder, war, poverty, and pestilence?”

This is a book about cryptography, among other things. Lawrence Waterhouse Price is a brilliant mathematician whose peculiar talents are discovered on a routine military test. He is assigned to a very secret project known initially as Detachment 2071 until Price remarks about the unrandom nature of the group’s name, “2071 is the product of two primes. And those numbers, 37 and 73, when expressed in decimal notation, are, as you can plainly see, the reverse of each other.” Randomness is important because their job is to manipulate the decoded information they have received from the Enigma and Ultra machines in such a way so that they can achieve maximum benefit from the use of that information without giving away to the Germans and Japanese that their code has been broken. They must make sure that Allied actions maintain the appearance of randomness and ignorance. A Marine raider sergeant Shaftoe is given the task of implementing Detachment 2072 (as it became).

For example, Price is stationed in Britain and there they have created machines—forerunners of the modern computer – that electrically examine the different possibilities of wheel combinations in the Enigma machine. These required large pegboards to connect the various circuits, so an inordinately large number of tall women needed to be hired as the pegboards were very high. If the Germans got copies of the personnel records, they would immediately notice a bell curve with an odd peak at one end and wonder why people working in this area were not chosen randomly, the bell curve being a random distribution. So Detachment 2072’s job would be to plant false personnel records to make sure the height distribution would be random so as not to give away any possible clues as to what they might be up to. The unit’s job is to create another layer of deception: “When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first…. Of course, to observe is not its real duty — we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed…. Then, when we come around and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious.” Price’s grandson and Shaftoe’s niece, unwittingly paired in the present, are working on a project to create a huge data haven in Southeast Asia when they discover that a sunken submarine may hold the secret of an unbreakable code that is tied in with a massive conspiracy that originated in Detachment 2072. For those who might be interested, there is a great description of how the Enigma machine worked. It was a periodic polyalphabetic system consisting of three – later four – interconnected wheels that embodied cycles within cycles. Three wheels have a period of 17576, i.e., the substitution alphabet that codes the first letter of the message will not appear again until the 17577th cycle.

When the Germans added the fourth wheel, the period became 456,976. To use the same substitution letter the message would have to be longer T than 456,976 characters, a virtual uncertainty. The Germans believed their four-wheel Enigma to be undecipherable. Stephenson has a delightful sense of irony that permeates the book. Price, because of his cryptological skills, has the highest security clearance possible: Ultra Mega. The only problem is that it’s such a high security clearance the fact that it exists must be kept secret from everyone except another person with Ultra Mega clearance so he always has to be issued a lower security clearance in order to get into secure areas none of the guards or other officers are permitted to learn about Ultra Mega. Stephenson’s perception of the war is curious. The winner would be the one who succeeded in breaking the other side’s codes and then manipulated his troops’ actions so as not to reveal those codes had been broken. The plots converge on an enormous gold reserve hidden in a mine, and the ciphers hold the key. It’s a great story. Be forewarned, it’s the first of a trilogy.

Stephenson has these wonderful little comments throughout the book that bring a broad grin to the face. For example, “See, you are being a little paranoid here and focusing on the negative. It’s not about how women are deficient. It’s more about how men are deficient. Our social deficiencies, lack of perspective, or whatever you want to call it, is what enables us to study one species of dragonfly for twenty years, or sit in front of a computer for a hundred hours a week writing code. This is not the behavior of a well-balanced and healthy person, but it can obviously lead to great advances in synthetic fibers. Or whatever.” Or Randy’s father dumps the contents out on a ping-pong table that inexplicably sits in the center of the rec room at Grandma’s managed care facility, whose residents are about as likely to play pingpong as they are to get their nipples pierced.” Do NOT be intimidated by the length (1000 pages) of this book. It’s loaded with fascinating detail and reads faster than 100 ten-page books.

zašto trojka? Očekivao sam zanimljiviju knjigu. Dijelovi iz prošlosti su zanimljivi, kriptografija je zanimljiva, ali priručnik od nekoliko stotina strana 'kako osnovati tvrtku u Manili i pri tome održati dobar tonus mišića a ne dehidrirati' me totalno ubio u pojam.

“I apologize if my limbic system has misinterpreted your gesture of emotional support.”

My husband insisted I’d like this massive novel largely about code breaking and war, and I was very hesitant. I do like military novels, but computer stuff is really not my specialty. Yet, I loved this dual-timelined, multigenerational story for its humor and quirk. Bobby Shaftoe has earned a spot in my favorite literary characters list.

At 42+ hours, this was quite the audio investment, but the narration is fantastic!

What an incredible novel, and well worth a reread every few years! Pure Stephenson, after his satirical science fiction phase, with Cryptonomicon being a bit more grounded in reality yet taking the hacker epic genre as far as it can go... And at the same time, a grand historical fiction yarn.

Techie treasure-hunting businessmen in the present overlapping with geeks during World War II inventing the digital computer, I mean how great is that?

However, as the rereads get further and further away from the 1999 setting the aging does start to show. By this I don't just mean the technology. Sure, for example, the video file thing is conspicuous and this is way before smartphones. And it's not necessarily the author's fault that the Philippines sadly didn't turn out as predicted. But that's not the point. If anything, for taking place in the 90s the novel is remarkably prescient on how important the internet has become in everyone's lives. What was new then, like email, is written matter-of-factly enough that much of the dialogue and storytelling fits in fine even after twenty years.

Unfortunately, and I hate to be the guy to say this but I simply must, it's the politics which have aged worst. There's a certain kind of faith in high-tech libertarianism, that young computer geniuses always know better than stuffy old bureaucrats, which comes across as very naive these days. Worst of all is the whole global 'second-amendment' moral of the story, the plan to give everyone in the world means to fight guerilla warfare because that would have stopped the holocaust or something, it seems like a terrible recipe for disaster today. (Like, Israel is mentioned in glowing terms at one point in the book, but if they really made the HEAP wouldn't Palestinians be one of the best examples of those who would use it to start an uprising?! The specifics are not explored at all, just the vague idealism, very libertarian.)

Moreover, Stephenson occasionally displays a sense of humor which goes for politically incorrect for the sake of being politically incorrect. Maybe it was cutting edge then, now it can come across as mean-spirited trolling. There's even a long conversation about which gods which civilisations worship, which is either a brilliant take cultural values or a borderline-racist oversimplification.

Uch, and the male-female dynamics. My top criticism of the book would have to be the focus on hacker everyman Randy Waterhouse, who overanalyzes everything and is the hero of the story despite not being that interesting, and his endlessly dragged on "relationship" with cool gal Amy Shaftoe. I get it, I really do, he's nerdy and takes a long time to build up the confidence to just ask her out... and then it's goes on and on all over the planet for hundreds and hundreds of pages because then Stephenson gets to share all his (sure at times quite fascinating) theories. But come on. With a bit more perspective, one realizes that Randy is kind of lame. The huge essays on male-female dynamics ultimately only amount to the main character's banal issues. There, I said it.

Okay I got my complaints out the way, and I still totally stand by my original 5-star rating because a hell of a lot of this book is still incredible! So many Big Ideas, so much to reflect on. The private digital currency part, wow, that may really go somewhere. (You obviously know what I'm talking about, right?)

And the World War II scenes are absolutely timeless, wouldn't change a thing. Which is roughly two-thirds of the book. The adventures of Lawrence Waterhouse and Bobby Shaftoe, so bloody cool. You'll come away knowing more than you ever thought you could about the Pacific War, military livelihood, spying, encryption, and war gold in Southeast Asia.

Everybody must read Cryptonomicon at least once, no matter the flaws, because it is awesome.

Executive Summary: If you're a computer or math geek, this book is a must read. If you like geeky humor mixed with world war 2, and random side tangents, this might also be a book for you.

Audio book: I listened to the unabridged audio book by William Dufris. This is the first that I have listened by him. While he didn't do distinct voices for all the characters he did do some as well as a few accents. His German accent was particularly good.

The audio suffers a bit from being unabridged, but thankfully in only a few places. I imagine the book has a bunch of white space/different font for some of the these parts where codes are written out, but Mr. Dufris is forced to read everything out and it can be a bit tedious.

This is my only relatively minor complaint. For a 42+ hour book, this occurred very infrequently.

n  Full Reviewn
This book has been on my to read list for a long time. Snow Crash is one of my favorite books. While this book is more historical fiction than sci-fi (and certainly not cyberpunk), it has the same geeky humor that I loved in Snow Crash so much.

The book has two time periods: The 1940's starting shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the mid-late 90s.

There are several point of view characters for the 40's timeline, but the primary one is Lawrence Waterhouse, an often misunderstood and awkward mathematical genius.

Waterhouse gets blown off by Einstein but becomes friends with Alan Turing. He eventually is put to work breaking codes of both the Japanese and later the Germans during the war.

Meanwhile in the "present" Randall is Unix Guru working with his friend Abby to set up their next business venture in the Philippines.

The other point of view characters include Goto Dango, a Japanese soldier, and Bobby Shafto an American soldier. Their stories augment the main narrative of Waterhouse's.

This book has several tangents, including one on beards and another on bicycles. Many of his tangents turn ordinary thinking into mathematical equations. I found most of them interesting if not amusing, but they are of little importance to the story, so I can see people complaining of the excess in what is a rather lengthy book.

The stories of the two timelines eventually converge in a way that wasn't very apparent to me until about the midway point or so.

I really enjoyed the book, although I'd be happy with some follow-up as I was left with several questions, though mostly minor ones.

Most of my questions relate to the historical accuracy of many events in the story. People like Alan Turing were quite real, as was his involvement in the British efforts to break German codes during the war. There is work involving the Enigma, but the names of the Japanese codes appear to have been changed, as well as replacing several of the people involved with fictional characters.

At some point I hope to find/read a non-fiction book (or books) on the breaking of codes in World War 2, and I am now fascinated by it.

This book will appeal to people interested in World War II, cryptography, paranoia at the highest level, swash buckling adventures, the power of money, commerce, international communications networking; which probably covers 80% of the readers in the world.

Unlike Stephenson’s book called Snow Crash (Highly recommended) this story is one in the present time with deep links back to the 1940’s during World War II.

The main characters are Bobby Shaftoe- a grunt in WW II Marines; Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse – a cryptography and code geek at the highest level; Goto Dengo – a Japanese soldier who follows orders without question, any order; Avi – super super paranoid genius and business person: Rudy – who ends up working for the Nazi’s during WW II. Along with a large supporting cast of characters

The bulk of the story revolves around creating and breaking codes during WW II and then extends beyond that as future off spring of the main characters run into each other when developing a data crypt in the Philippines, while looking for some long ago buried gold (literally tons of it).

They intermingle and run into mostly bad guys along the way.

Stephenson fully develops each character and we are privy to what they are thinking during various situations. The evolution of computers is blended into the story line as well.

The various story arcs move along at a fast pace which is god as the book is over 1100 pages long.

Recommended. I have Stephensons ReaMd on my shelf to read and am looking forward to it based on the last two books I have read from this author.

I got halfway through this 900 page book and said to myself, “This is going to be one of my all time favorites.” The plot takes place in two time periods: World War II and in the late 1990’s when this book was written. It’s been described as historical fiction AND science fiction. I couldn’t at first understand how this book could be considered science fiction until later in the book I realized one of the characters popped up in both stories 40 years apart and he didn’t age.

Some of the encryption methods described were over my head but I had a good idea what was going on anyway. I spent hours as a kid doing cryptograms in the newspaper. Usually if I could decrypt the 3-letter word “the” I could then figure out the puzzle. Some of the puzzles were more difficult and I got a real sense of satisfaction when I could solve them.

A few of the things criticized by other reviewers didn’t bother me. For instance, I loved Stephenson’s digressions. One of my favorites was the description of a character in the 1990’s having his wisdom teeth removed. The author’s dry humor throughout had me laughing out loud.

Another (female) reviewer criticized the caveman attitude the male characters had about sex. Apparently if men confuse sex with love they are despicable. Give me a break. I am a 65 year old woman so have some experience under my belt and can say this is just the way most men are and will not change until humankind experiences some kind of evolutionary metamorphosis. Speaking of males, I adored the character Bobby Shaftoe. He is the most manliest of manly men I have ever encountered in my reading.

Some reviewers wrote that this isn’t Stephenson’s best book. This makes me happy. This is the first of his books I’ve read. I now have many more books of his to enjoy.

A fun and wondering yarn. Neal would benefit from an editor to streamline some of his digressions, but unlike Gravity's Rainbow, this WWII historical fiction's tangents are entertaining. Overall I think this book asks too much from the reader, but if you find yourself with fifty hours of downtime, this isn't a bad way to fill it.

A schlubby white computer nerd leaves his shallow, shrewish, gold-digger (literally) feminist academic girlfriend and, against all odds, convinces a super-hot young, exotically Asian, emotional-to-the-point-of-crazy, virginal woman to sleep with him (the experience appears to be satisfying only on his end of things). A WWII-era American Marine travels across the world to be reunited with his (also super-hot, young, exotically Asian) girlfriend, but when it turns out she has been disfigured in the war he commits suicide. A military code breaker develops a theory that women run a global "Ejaculation Control Conspiracy" (the author's term) to force men into monogamous marriage.

Also, the women in this book don't understand math. But they want to talk about feelings and china patterns a lot.

Basically 1130 pages of misogynistic ego stroke. One of the worst books I've ever read.