Δυσκολεύτηκα να βαθμολογήσω αυτό το βιβλίο, καθώς η ποιότητα ανεβοκατέβαινε σαν τρενάκι του λούναπάρκ. Πολλά κομμάτια του ήταν σκέτη ποίηση, και μάλιστα ποίηση για τα μαθηματικά, άλλα περιέγραφαν τους ανθρώπους και τις καταστάσεις με διορατικότητα και καυστικότητα. Άλλα πάλι ήταν αφόρητα κλισέ αποφθέγματα με ραστιστικό, σεξιστικό και σνομπ υπόβαθρο και υπεραπλουστευμένες θεωρίες. Το μεγαλύτερο μέρος ήταν απλά ένα ενδιαφέρον, αλλά μάλλον προβλέψιμο θρίλερ περιπέτειας. Το βαθμολόγησα κατά μέσο όρο και αξίζει να το διαβάσει κανείς ακόμη και μόνο για τις ιστορικές λεπτομέρειες. Επισήμανση: το βιβλίο το "άκουσα" ως audiobook όταν πήγαινα γυμναστήριο (γι' αυτό μου πήρε και σχεδόν δύο μήνες να το τελειώσω). Δεν ξέρω εάν το να το διαβάσει κάποιος με σταθερό ρυθμό θα προσέδιδε στην ανάγνωση καλύτερη συνέχεια και ολοκληρωμένη εμπειρία, ή εάν οι 1000+ σελίδες του θα καταντούσαν κουραστικές.

Rating this book was not a easy task. Parts of it were pure poetry, and poetry about mathematics at that, which I wouldn't have thought is easy to write, and poignant insights into the human condition. Other parts were pretty cring-worthy theatises of racisit, classist, sexist thinking, chock-full of cliches and over-simplified reasoning. About half was a solid, if occasionally humdrum, adventure-thriller, interesting and predictable. I gave it three stars on average and it's well worth a read. Note: I "heard" this as an audiobook every time I went to the jym. I cannot tell if reading it in a more regular way (for me it would take about a week) would add continuity to the reading experience, or if the 1000+ pages would get tiring.

Interesting historical novel with some fiction about cryptographics during world war 2.

Look, this isn’t really a novel.

Huh. Is there an echo in here?

I was thinking it had been several years since I last read a Neal Stephenson novel, but it turns out to be just under a year. I borrowed Cryptonomicon from a friend’s mother, because it’s truly not on that I’m a mathematician by training yet haven’t read the most mathematical Stephenson work. I put off reading it for a few weeks, because I knew that it would take a while. This past week was probably not the best week to read it—then again, would there have been a best week? I got lots of programming done on my website while avoiding this book, though.

This book is ostensibly about codes and code-breaking. I’d liken it to The Imitation Game, except I also have managed to skip that one somehow—and anyway, Alan Turing and Bletchley Park feature much less prominently here. Rather, Cryptonomicon follows a fictional friend of Turing’s, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, who is a genius codebreaker. Waterhouse serves in the American armed forces during World War II, where he breaks codes (duh) and gets involved in other unlikely shenanigans. Stephenson develops this plot in parallel with one set in the present day (which is to say, 1999, which is, gosh, 18 years ago now). Lawrence’s grandson, Randy, ends up interacting with the descendants of many of the other characters from Lawrence’s story, as he and a friend try to set up a data haven off the coast of the Philippines.

That’s ostensibly the plot, but like I said, this isn’t really a novel and the story isn’t really a story. It’s more of a loose narrative framework around which Stephenson erects pages-long diatribes on coding, computer science, mathematics, and other very nerdy stuff. It is much like his later efforts of n  Anathemn and Seveneves, which are more about the philosophy of mathematics and how humanity might adapt to life in space, respectively, although of the three novels this one might have something most recognizable as a plot.

I’m not afraid to admit to skimming large portions of this novel. It’s not necessary to … experience … every word of Cryptonomicon to follow it. The connections among the characters are fairly heavy-handed, with Stephenson giving the reader plenty of opportunities to notice a familiar name, symbol, or meme showing up in a different place and time. Additionally, I can tolerate the fairly frequent tangents Stephenson has his characters go off on to explain one mathematical or cryptological concept or other; I’m less tolerant of how this spills over into the descriptions of simplest actions. Randy can’t possibly open his car door, no—this occasions nothing less than three meaty paragraphs on the manufacture of his car and the way the angle of the car door makes Randy think about a line of Perl code he wrote back in his university days. Perl, by the way, is a script people often use on UNIX….

Seriously, this book is not a well-edited, well-paced, well-plotted adventure. It’s Neal Stephenson making shit up about guys named Lawrence and Randy so he can tell you all the cool computer things he knows.

And to his credit, he manages to often be entertaining while doing so. For the most part, I enjoyed the segments that follow Lawrence. The role of code-breaking in World War II, and its concurrent stimulation of the invention of electronic computing, is an interesting subject that is often overlooked in historical treatments of that time. In addition to explaining how certain code systems worked and how the Allies broke these codes, Stephenson also takes the time to show us, rather than merely tell us, how encrypted communications were essential to the war effort. Moreover, he also points out the difficulty of breaking codes in wartime: you don’t want the enemy to know their codes are broken, because then they will change to a different code. So you have to throw them off the scent, so to speak, and create fake reasons for why you knew what the enemy was going to do. I don’t know how accurate this is to actual activities during the war, but it’s a fun corollary thought experiment to the whole activity of intercepting and reading enemy messages.

There’s also a fair amount of humour in here. I liked the highly fictionalized, summarized communiques between Bischoff and Donitz. I liked the portrayal of Colonel Comstock’s preparations for a meeting with Lawrence, girding himself and his team as if they were about to go into an actual battle.

Similarly, although I was less enamoured of the present-day plot and characters, I still like the general ideas. Stephenson was ahead of the curve when it came to talking about cryptocurrencies and even data havens. These ideas seem almost saturated, old hat here in 2017—but I imagine that in 1999, when the Web was still kind of a space for hackers and academics and military types, it was all cutting edge. Stephenson makes a strong case that there are different types of heroism, and that having a strong technical background can be just as valuable as being able to fight or being educated in a scholarly field like law.

I just wish that I didn’t have to wade through so much dull or outright dumb stuff to get to the good bits of this book.

This is the third book in a row I’m dragging for having a rubbish depiction of women. Honestly, people, it isn’t hard, but let’s go over the basics again so we stop screwing this up.

Maybe you should have women as main characters? There are very few named women characters in this book. Most of them exist as sexual and romantic interests for the men, who are the main characters.

Maybe your women should exist for reasons other than sexytimes? Amy Shaftoe is the closest we get to a female main character in this book. She is not a viewpoint character. She does not have an appreciable arc. She has an illusion of agency, but this is largely undermined by her purpose to exist as a manic pixie dreamgirl for Randy. Stephenson seems to confuse “strong female character” with “does lots of physical stuff/wears a leather jacket/I must imply that she might be a lesbian at least five times”.

Maybe you should stop being creepy? Cryptonomicon is super male-gazey in about every sense of the term. The narrator constantly mentions how much Lawrence or Randy need to masturbate, have sex, or otherwise ejaculate before they can “focus”. The male characters from both time periods make sexist remarks, talk about women, look at and objectify women, etc., in ways that are boorish and chauvinistic and stereotypical. There are more examples of this than I can count or possibly mention here. At one point, Randy and Avi are discussing a lawsuit directed at their fledgling company. Avi compares the lawsuit with a mating ritual, saying that their company is a “desirable female” and the lawsuit bringer wants to mate with them, and this is his way of posturing. Later in the novel, Randy spends a few pages mulling over how some women are “just wired” to want to be submissive to men, and that’s why Charlene ended up leaving him, because of course as a computer god, his brain can’t possibly be wired to understand little things like social cues. (It’s actually amazing, in a way, how Stephenson can manage to perpetuate stereotypes against both women and male nerds at the same time.)

It’s gross, is what it is. In any other book it would be bad enough. What really bothers me about its presence in Cryptonomicon is how it compounds, and has perhaps even influenced, given its age and status in the genre now, the portrayal of technologically-adept/minded folks (call them nerds, geeks, hackers, whatever). Young women interested in cryptography deserve to read a story about cryptography without constantly seeing the few female characters in the book objectified or reduced down to “biologically, women want to submit and have sex!” Young men shouldn’t see this kind of behaviour rationalized or played for laughs; they shouldn’t receive the message that nerds are somehow “programmed” to be socially awkward and therefore it’s OK to be creepy and male gazey all the time.

So Cryptonomicon is a book with a bunch of good bits too few and scattered among less good or downright weird and gross bits that I didn’t much appreciate. The mathematical, code-breaking parts of this book are good—really good. But, I mean, I kind of wish I had access to an abridged version with just those parts? Because wading through the, say, 80% of the book that isn’t those parts is just not worth the effort.

Honestly, so far the best depiction of mathematics in fiction I’ve come across is n  The Housekeeper and the Professorn, which doesn’t only depict math but also humanizes it intensely. (And before you ask, no, I haven’t read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime but I certainly plan to steal—uh, borrow—a copy lying around school one of these days.) Cryptonomicon tries to be a math nerd’s wet dream, but Stephenson’s insistence on mentioning his male characters’ wet dreams just doesn’t work for me.

n  n

https://poseidons99.wordpress.com/201...

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 am a big fan of Neal Stephenson. I previously gave Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Anathem each 5 stars, and include the first two among my favorite science fiction stories. That is why, I was so disappointed that I didn't love this. I didn't even really like it.

There are parts of this novel that are brilliant, and the scope of it is impressive, but it just seemed to drag on for too long and in too many spots. Great writing, great characters and even a great story, but it was just too slow to keep me into it.

I still love Neal Stephenson, however, and am just going chalk this up to a bump in the road.

Bene prieš dvidešimt metų skaitytą „Cryptonomicon“ jau labai seniai prisiekinėjau sau pasikartoti. Bet vis atidėdavau. Gal baidė plytos apimtis – vis tik virš 1000 puslapių (kita vertus, tai, jog prieš porą metų pasikartojau to paties rašytojo „Barokinį ciklą“, kuriame trys tokio pat storio plytos, tai tarsi ir paneigtų), o gal bijojau, kad įspūdis nebebus toks pats. Kaip ten bebūtų, atėjo laikas. Be to, susiradau pateisinamą priežastį, bet tegul ji lieka neįvardinta.
Romano veiksmas rutuliojasi dvejuose laiko sluoksniuose – Antrojo Pasaulinio karo metais ir pačioje XX amžiaus pabaigoje.
II PK metais sekame paskui genialų matematiką ir kriptoanalitiką Lawrence Waterhouse bei nuo morfijaus priklausomą jūrų pėstininką Bobby Shaftoe. Abu jie priklauso slaptam 2702 būriui – sąjungininkų grupei, kuri narplioja Ašies šalių komunikacijos kodus ir kartu organizuoja klaidinančias operacijas, kurių tikslas – nuslėpti nuo nacių ir jų šalininkų, kad šių šifrai nulaužti. Vėliau abu herojus aplinkybės nubloškia ir į Pietryčių Aziją.
XX amžiaus pabaigoje vieno iš tų herojų anūkas, kietas programavimo maniakas Randy Waterhouse sykiu su bičiuliais imasi projekto sukurti nepriklausomą duomenų prieglobstį Pietryčių Azijoje, kur sutinka Americą Shaftoe (patys spėkite, kieno anūkę). Galiausiai įvykiai pasisuka taip, kad Randy ir kompanija imasi karo metais japonų suslėptų aukso atsargų paieškų. Panašu, kad informacija apie auksą slypi Randy senelio išsaugotose, taip ir nenulaužtose šifruotėse.
Ir nors „Cryptonomicon“ laimėjo 2000-jų Locus Award kaip geriausias mokslinės fantastikos romanas (o be to – buvo nominuotas Hugo ir Arthur C. Clarke premijoms), bet čia įžvelgiu klastą. Mat tos fantastikos čia... kaip čia pasakius? Na, nėr. Nebent paminėsim lyg ir nemirtingą Enochą Rootą, kuris neretai šmėkščioja ir kituose Stephensono knygose, kad ir tame pačiame „Barokiniame cikle“ (kuriame, beje, sutinkame ir tolimus Waterhaouse bei Shaftoe protėvius). Bet tai čia toks labiau link fantasy požymių būtų?
Žodžiu, su žanru komplikuota. Gal protingiausia būtų knygą įvertinti kaip istorinio nuotykinio romano ir technotrilerio pavainikį. O gal tiesiog kaip gerą knygą. Arba ne – labai gerą knygą. Vieną iš geriausių, kurias esu skaitęs.
Tai mažiausiai šeši iš penkių galimų. Mažiausiai.

3.5 Stars
I loved the beginning of this story filled with codes, mathematics and other nerdy ideas. Neal Stephenson is quickly become a favourite author with his quipped smart narratives. That being said, this one was too darn long. If this had been shorter, it would likely be an absolute favourite.

Though I'm giving this book four stars, I am a little disappointed in it. For the first time, Stephenson's wordiness got to me. At first, it is all fun and "character building" and enjoyable to read. But after working through 700 pages and still hitting long stretches about Randy's fascination with dust devils as a kid or how he had really bad wisdom teeth years earlier, I got a little frustrated. I had the feeling he was striving for length instead of letting the story dictate the number of pages.

I am also what I assume to be a rarity in that I read Anathem before Crytonomicon. I actually liked Anathem a lot more. This is partly because everything felt necessary. I actually didn't want it to end, whereas I was ready for Cryptonomicon's ending.

I don't mean to be too negative, because I believe this is a great book. The two WWII storylines were the highlight for me. Loved Lawrence and Bobby and pretty much everyone else from that era. Especially enjoyed the Admiral Yamamoto scene. I was less impressed by the main storyline set in the present. Simply didn't enjoy Randy and Avi and their group of geeks as much. I came around on Randy a bit, mainly due to his Captain Crunch habit, but Avi had no such saving grace. Still, it was a masterful blending of multiple storylines into a cohesive and enjoyable experience.

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 for the sake of it.

To start with, this book is way.... too.... long.

Just way too long. No real way of getting around it.
Cryptonomicon fails to carry its own weight, even if it didn't have so much of it.
It *is* a page-turner, which is good, seeing as it has so much of those, but more because there is very little actual content. Rather than drawing you in, it lets you drift over; instead of using the breadth of scope to mean something, it really doesn't.

The 2 WWII parts are more of a time-line rather than a story, and the third part, the actual story, is very weak, and no real connections other than some obvious ones, that is, don't expect any last minute golden thread that will tie it all.
There is a lot of fanfare around and in the book, and there's a whole lot of research thrown in for good measure, but there isn't much of a point, where you surface out of a 10 page description that is painstakingly detailed, with as much story in it, as if you took a break and went to read an encyclopaedia. Other such detailed descriptions include a 5 pager about the cars going in or out, a pornographic description of cereal eating, each of those gives the reader no added value other than to be impressed by the writer's way around words, which a good editor would've red-marked away had this been a debut piece.

Characteristics is shoddy, which is amazing for such a large novel. With 1100+ pages in paperback, some character development is expected, but characters here rarely act, and mostly react, being moved from place to place by the circumstances and the background characters that appear and disappear, without any excuse than the sake of pushing the plot forward, toward a very dull and, strangely enough, rushed, ending, which is not ever partially a conclusion and is an ending simply because the book ends there, leaving many threads hanging in mid-air. The only glimpses the author allows us into the mind of the characters is when a mathematical, military, or technological problem is in need of being solved. Other than that, there is a lot of inner monologue, but hardly any glimpses into the actual "inner" parts, resulting in characters moving from one state of mind to another with little to no reasoning.

This is a book that haven't decided whether it wants to be "techy" or about technology, resulting in parts "for the layman" and parts that demand some knowledge in computer tech to understand.
This is a book that attempts to tell us a lot, which is basically how good is the author in finding yet another meaningless, but semantically cool, metaphor.

This is a book that might've been, minus about 400-500 redundant pages and plus about 100 pages to close the remaining threads, a fun, intelligent read. At current state, its a smart-alek, overly self-important, and hardly elegant.

I took my sweet time with this one, and I am glad I did. The ambition here is sky-high, and Stephenson masterfully transforms it into a captivating and profoundly resonant journey. The characters' odysseys through time and space are not just entertaining but downright emotional. Just the sheer volume of WWII trivia I picked up makes this a worthwhile experience. This book offers a dazzling narrative, heart-racing action, delightful dives into philosophy, history, math, and cryptography, all topped off with a gut-wrenching finale. Easily one of Neal Stephenson's finest works.

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 the bygone days before the world moved on. When it popped up for $1.99 on one of my cheap-o emails, I snapped it up.

This mammoth tome is classified as science fiction but could easily be looked at as historical fiction since the sf element is minuscule. Neal Stephenson weaves together multiple plot threads, three during World War II and one in the present day, and produces a fine tapestry of a novel.

On one hand, you have Randy Waterhouse, part of the Epiphyte corporation, a start-up dedicated to creating a data haven in the Phillipines. On the other, you have the converging tales of a Marine named Bobby Shaftoe, a cryptographer named Lawrence Waterhouse, and Goto Dengo, a Japanese engineer. As diverse as the elements are, Stephen manages to bring everything together. Eventually.

I was an apple-cheeked young lad when I first read this, back when the internet was still new to most of us. Now, as a curmudgeon 15 years older, I still enjoyed reading it quite a bit. Despite my usual intolerance for digressions, and this book has many, I found it hard to put down for long. The bits of history, cryptography, and the proper way to eat Captain Crunch all held my attention.

In the years between my first read and this one, I'd forgotten how hilarious this book can be at times. Lawrence Waterhouse is a bit like Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory, only less likely to have the shit kicked out of him on a regular basis if he were a real person.

Funny how some things never change, though. My gripes the first time through were my gripes this time. While I enjoyed the journey, the writing could have been tightened up a bit. I felt like Stephenson was driving around looking for a free parking space when there was already one pretty close to the door. Also, a part near the ending, which I will not spoil here, came out of left field and felt tacked on, unnecessary, and kind of stupid. Also, I maintain that Stephenson hasn't written a great ending since Zodiac. Other than that, I thought the book was pretty great. Four out of five stars.