Just finished (at last) Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson which certainly is an interesting book.
I see from the reviews now that it was pretty controversial, and among the most-offered criticisms is the abrupt ending. This did not bother me that much, as it seems to me that it was winding down anyway. Had it gone on much longer many would have given up.
I can also understand that anybody who is not a math, crypto, computer or techno phreak may give it a “meh.” While there was much I failed to understand, it fascinated me from beginning to end. The plot, if it can be called that, was lot of fun, jumping radically from character to character and from WWII to the present and back, but it seemed to make sense to me.
And there were some totally hilarious parts throughout. The chapter aptly entitled “Crunch” about how properly to eat Cap’n Crunch cereal was side-splitting, as was the long memo from Randy in the chapter “Hoard” which had me laughing out loud. Anybody wanting to read this might try those two chapters first, as it won’t detract from the plot. Then if you do quit before finishing, you won’t have missed these two gems.
To me, this book was something that might have been written by a committee comprised of Stephen Hawking, Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka and Groucho Marx.
I’ve read *Cryptonomicon * twice, and will likely read it again later this year (count me in the “like it” camp).
There’s much to like about it, and I discovered quite a lot in the second reading that skipped by me in the first. In my first reading, some of the content was near-future fiction – not so by the time I finished it a second time. For some reason, in addition to the Cap’n Crunch part that you mentioned, the passage dealing with Van Eck Phreaking has stuck with me.
Now that you’ve finished Cryptonomicon, there’s 3,000 more pages of Shaftoe and Waterhouse hijinks waiting for you in Stephenson’s The Baroque Trilogy. The three books have a decidedly different tone from Cryptonomicon (and each other), but I thought they were an intensely rewarding reading experience as well.
I hope that Stephenson writes more about the characters in *Cryptonomicon * some time – especially America Shaftoe. Yowza.
Rereading it again right now (2nd time through). Man, a great book.
Given my role these days as ‘entrepreneur’ I found the business plan writing to be hilarious. Remember, every single sentence must say or imply ‘will enhance shareholder value’.
I enjoyed it, though I have to say that N.S. uses a similar structural plot device as the big climax (or failure of big climax) in several of his earlier works. I was happy to see that disappear in the long, long plot arc that is The Baroque Cycle.
I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was amused by the characters using mathematics to try to describe social situations (e.g. how the World War II Waterhouse character estimates his mental acuity vs. lack of sex, or his modern-day descendants draw a large graph in a parking lot to distribute their inheritance.) The ending was a disappointment - too abrupt, as already mentioned in this thread. The idea that using a fortune to design cheap, easy-to-build firearms (with the idea that this will serve as a guarantee to prevent genocide) seemed dubious to me. I would have used the money for education, micro-loans, medical care, or something along those lines.
The main character (Randy Waterhouse)'s nemesis never felt fully realized to me. His appearance in the jungle at the end seemed totally random. On the other hand, this person’s internet harangues about hive minds reminded me of some of the more bizarre postings seen in the past at this message board.
For people interested in computers and/or World War II it is definitely a worthwhile read.
I hated it. Bored the piss out of me. A friend recommended it so I gave it a try, but I just never cared what was going to happen. I didn’t finish it.
BTW, I am a computer programmer and I do work with crytography.
If you liked Cryptonomicon, I suggest following up with the three novels of The Baroque Cycle – prequels of a sort, featuring the Waterhouse and Shaftoe ancestors.
It’s one of my favorite books. I’m finding Stephenson can be an aquired taste. He has this way of making most of the plot happen off-stage, so to speak, that can be very off-putting. You often have to infer big chunks of plot that you didn’t get to see from context. But once you wrap your mind around that, he writes some damned fine fiction. I’m in the middle of The Confusion now.
I liked the portion of the book set in world war two; the modern-day plot was less interesting. I suppose that at the height of the dot-com boom, creating an international “data haven” on a remote island seemed like a bold quest. Several years, later, when I read the book, it just seemed goofy to me – Switzerland meets Pets.com.
You may enjoy searching for several older threads on these books.
I found Cryptonomicon passably interesting, tho I definitely preferred some parts and characters to others.
I considered reading the subsequent books a waste of time.
IMO NS could definitely use a good - and ruthless - editor.
Of course, there are a number of folks who enthusiastically praise these books.
I loved it, except for the aforementioned chronic “inability to gracefully conclude and pull together the various subplots and reconcile with a satisfying final chapter” that Stephenson suffers from.
I think Stephenson is the best fiction author I’ve ever read, period. The man doesn’t write - he weaves tapestries of the finest persian wool, and then tells you exactly who made the wool and what he had for breakfast the day he died before describing the history of the persian wool industry including that little episode of royal intrigue around 1513 and all the consequences thereof.
I loved Cryptonomicon. Most of the fiction that I read is light, fast-food stuff. By comparison, this book was a big, thick steak. A bit tough, but extremely flavorful.
As a guy who has “trouble” getting into works of fiction, and finds non-fiction much more interesting and “wowing” than most fiction (95% of what I read is science, biographies, and history), I think the reason I enjoyed it was precisely because it involves so much math and history ‘fact’.
I made it about 150 pages. I found it tedious and grossly overwritten. Stephenson wears his erudition too heavily: description is ponderous and connections are made painstakingly and painfully. Stephenson’s pedantry is unyielding and phenomenally irritating.
On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed Snow Crash, and I enjoyed the Baroque Cycle albeit with strong reservations. Though I have the same objections to Baroque as I do to Cryptonomicon, I found the author’s voice to be less intrusive.
And count me in the “love it” camp. I’ve now read Cryptonomicon two times (not counting an aborted first effort), and am on my second re-reading of The Baroque Cycle (about halfway through The Confusion as of today’s subway ride - specifically, Eliza’s Commerce Masque). I’ll concede that Stephenson can get too ambitious and not know how to finish a book to close a few dozen dangling threads. But the man can write brilliantly witty, and much more importantly, effortless dialogue. Unlike most fiction, I almost never read a character’s line in his books and think “nobody ever talks like that!” His writing is compelling and interesting, without being manipulative. That’s difficult.
And agreed with a number of other posters that if you enjoyed Cryptonomicon, do try reading The Baroque Cycle, and then re-read Cryptonomicon. My favorite throwaway joke from my post-Cycle reading of Cryptonomicon:Gomer Bulstrood is a character in the first book of The Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver, a somewhat stuffy Puritan with a bit of a love of, and skill for, furniture manufacturing, who moves to America specifically because there are so many big, sturdy trees for building. In Cryptonomicon, there is a chapter side-story (the abovementioned Van Eck Phreak incident, I believe) that involves a character’s girlfriend getting passionately, gushingly, orgasmically turned on by the fetish of having sex on (to paraphrase) a “heavy duty, Grandma grade, Gomer Bulstrood bedroom set.”
