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4.12 AVERAGE
4.12 AVERAGE
It's kind of hard to review Cryptonomicon for two reasons: for one, it's a long book with a whole lot of stuff that happens, some of which I liked and some of which I didn't. The second is that I read it over the course of something like four months, an hour a week, so I had a very disjointed experience. Still, though, I enjoyed it, and I'd recommend the book to anyone who can sit through nine hundred pages of material that, while it's often interesting, can get dull at times.
DNF. Obviously there is an audience for this. For me it felt like I was reading it to prove something to… myself? Someone else? Idk. But not a good feeling so I stopped a hundred odd pages in. I’ve loved and read and re-read Snow Crash, ReamDe, and enjoyed the story in Fall (though it was bloated, I happened to find a meditative flow in the tangents). I got half-way through Sevenese (very much want to finish), and have enjoyed NS’s journalistic endeavors through the years. This book was honestly irritating.
adventurous
informative
slow-paced
Personally I wouldn't consider this among Stephenson's best. It's bloated and in desperate need of an editor, contains turns of phrase that made me physically cringe, and features a rotating cast of horny white male narrators (excluding one Japanese male character who IMO was more interesting but at times one-dimensional and also seemingly never horny). I did like the alternate-universe aspects and thought the fictional countries were interesting and distinct. Stephenson also did a good job weaving together perspectives and timelines, though it felt too obvious at the end, as though some of the reveals were meant to be a plot twist or shocking discovery in the last 100 pages of the book.
Definitely more of a WW2 novel than a cryptography or spy novel, so if you want a novel with a crash course on (modern) cryptography systems, this is not really the book for you. I'm glad my experience is over and I don't plan to re-read this book.
Other recs: Read something by Cory Doctorow if you want more interesting white guy narrators and/or treatises on (modern) cybersecurity. Or, if you must read Stephenson, Zodiac and Snow Crash are much better.
Worst line: "She is lazily regarding a map of Scandinavia. Sweden dangles like a flaccid, circumcised phallus. Finland bulges scrotally underneath."
Definitely more of a WW2 novel than a cryptography or spy novel, so if you want a novel with a crash course on (modern) cryptography systems, this is not really the book for you. I'm glad my experience is over and I don't plan to re-read this book.
Other recs: Read something by Cory Doctorow if you want more interesting white guy narrators and/or treatises on (modern) cybersecurity. Or, if you must read Stephenson, Zodiac and Snow Crash are much better.
Worst line: "She is lazily regarding a map of Scandinavia. Sweden dangles like a flaccid, circumcised phallus. Finland bulges scrotally underneath."
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gore, Violence, War
Moderate: Body horror, Infidelity, Sexual content
Minor: Child death, Sexual violence, Slavery, Antisemitism, Cannibalism, Alcohol, Colonisation
It's a war novel, expect descriptions of horrible things from WW2. Uses outdated slurs (homo, Nip/Jap ) but generally doesn't espouse homophobia. One scene significantly features the use of blackface in war.
Oof. This was a slog to get through. The story was interesting enough but it got logged down by too much computer jargon (in my opinion, although if you are familiar with these kinds of things it may be different). I think in the end what killed it for me is that I never got emotionally invested in the characters. If you're going to embark on a 1000 page journey and enjoy it, you need to connect with the characters. And though Amy Shaftoe was a strong independent woman, she was there mostly as eye candy. There were no prominent female characters.
I got bored with Avi and Randy and telecommunications thing. I never understood the point of the Dentist. Lawrence was a stereotypical math/computer nerd who didn't really have much else to his character. I didn't like Bobby Shaftoe. Goto was probably the only one I felt anything for.
This book was too long and too boring for me. The end was disappointing. Really, a random guy you had a previous spat with comes to find you in the jungle?!? This is probably the last time I take a book recommendation from my brother! Clearly we have very different tastes!
I got bored with Avi and Randy and telecommunications thing. I never understood the point of the Dentist. Lawrence was a stereotypical math/computer nerd who didn't really have much else to his character. I didn't like Bobby Shaftoe. Goto was probably the only one I felt anything for.
This book was too long and too boring for me. The end was disappointing. Really, a random guy you had a previous spat with comes to find you in the jungle?!? This is probably the last time I take a book recommendation from my brother! Clearly we have very different tastes!
Cryptonomicon is exhausting. To start with the good: the concept of this novel is enthralling and some of the prescient ideas and in-depth analysis of existing, niche concepts were fascinating. I also came to appreciate and even like some of the characters by the end of this journey. Some scenes were very interesting and indeed, technologically thrilling. Of specific note would be Randy working around the potential of Van Eck phreaking in his prison cell, the final 100 page march to the gold in Manila, and Bobby Shaftoe's culminating moments. Now, the bad. To begin, this novel could really do without maybe 80% of the first two-thirds, it is incessant meandering through arguably pointless side-stories. They barely characterized, they slowly provided context, they barely interested. Goto Dengo's suffering in Polynesia was a long-winded way of getting him to a random base, Waterhouse's war-time decryption was remarkably dry, and the whole modern story was dreadfully lacking in interesting things happening until the last quarter. In fact, a lot of this is due to Stephenson's distracted writing. He tells of these crazy things happening as pieces of dialogue told between awkward, nerdy characters that feel no real connection to these events. The whole "world circling the Crypt" narrative felt soured by the fact that Randy just spent his time, frankly, dicking around across the Pacific while being moderately paranoid and impassive. How can I care about such high stakes when the characters hardly care if they are jailed at all. I never really felt for any of these characters with this emotionless writing that often gave way to extended digressions into antiquated, and even more antiquated technology in the midst of engaging plot. Layered on top of this were poor analogies that were clogging up even further the reading of the plot, so now the plot has technical digressions interspersing it, itself interspersed with odd descriptions of ordinary events which at times require their own digressions to explain, and that is not to even get into the digressions about masturbation and other such trivialities. All of which made the actually engaging portions of the novel supremely separated, and the fascinating ideas watered down by no one, not even Stephenson, taking it seriously. The point of view switching also hampered the reading experience; every time I was getting into a chapter, and a perspective, a great ending would crash down, egging me onto read more, and at the start of the next chapter would be a completely different perspective, decades or thousands of miles apart, beginning in the middle of a confusing scene. I would then trudge through half a dozen pages, completely confused, finally get some perspective on what has happened since I last touched base with the character, start appreciating what is going on, and then have the carpet jerked out from beneath my feet all over again as the chapter ends and a new one begins.
I say all of this, not because I hate this book, though I certainly did not enjoy it. I say this because some ideas here are fascinating, and because I wish that I could have loved this novel. I might not be the biggest fan of war-time media, particularly World War II, but I love technical descriptions, learning more about niche and detailed subject matters, cryptography, 90's technology, and the whole allure of being a computer science businessman. This novel by virtue of its subject matter, is not for everyone or really most people. But, it should have been for me, and it just wasn't. And that's a damn shame.
I say all of this, not because I hate this book, though I certainly did not enjoy it. I say this because some ideas here are fascinating, and because I wish that I could have loved this novel. I might not be the biggest fan of war-time media, particularly World War II, but I love technical descriptions, learning more about niche and detailed subject matters, cryptography, 90's technology, and the whole allure of being a computer science businessman. This novel by virtue of its subject matter, is not for everyone or really most people. But, it should have been for me, and it just wasn't. And that's a damn shame.
(3.5/5) It was an interesting book from Neal Stephenson. It dealt a lot with privacy and discussed a great deal of internet related things that I ended up looking up. Overall a pretty good book. Thought provoking pretty much the whole way through.
challenging
informative
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I felt like it was two books. I liked the WWII part and I hated the modern part. If I read it again, I will skip everything present day and just read the WWII part. I just didn't care about any of the modern day characters at all. The only modern part I liked was the distribution of the Waterhouse inheritance, which was really funny.
I liked the story but the writing is not for me. Lots of misogyny and lengthy descriptions of things not important led to a book that’s at least twice as long as it needs to be.
May be my favorite book ever and one of the only ones I'd ever re-read.