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4.12 AVERAGE
4.12 AVERAGE
While I will always love A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer the most, in my heart of hearts I have to admit this is probably Stephenson's best book.
This was truly an exciting and mind-blowing book, a thrilling story that was a tour-de-force on a range of intellectual subjects. It's very nerdy, and Stephenson's hardcore fan base is clearly among the geek or nerd population. Hey, I'm one, and I found it hard to not be enthusiastic reading this work, all 1,130 pages of it. If I had one criticism, it would be that there is but one well-rounded characterization of a female in the entire book, and she is a love interest of one of the central protagonists. If you are interested in espionage, cryptography, information theory, computer science, physics, world history, philosophy, or the sociology of highly talented but socially awkward people (like mathematicians, computer geeks, top engineers, etc.) you will find loads of interesting material in this story. The book even includes an appendix that explains a manual crypto-system that is used in the book, where the key is generated using an ordinary deck of cards. There's a working Perl script in the text to generate pseudo-random numbers, much discussion of the zeta function and its importance for code generation, in-depth discussions of mining engineering, a storyline revolving around Alan Turing and the development of the digital computer....
All this is told in very clear, understandable language, in the context of an exciting blood-and-guts story of war, love, and riches. This is a great read, I hope you enjoy it!
All this is told in very clear, understandable language, in the context of an exciting blood-and-guts story of war, love, and riches. This is a great read, I hope you enjoy it!
I love the way the two story lines are woven together. The amount of research required to get this written was probably enormous and I appreciate every minute!
Definitely a must-read for people interested in historical fiction, WW2 era, cryptography, early computers... late computers even! ;)
Definitely a must-read for people interested in historical fiction, WW2 era, cryptography, early computers... late computers even! ;)
This is my kind of book.
Clever, funny, convoluted and eloquent in equal measure.
A stupendous bad-ass.
Clever, funny, convoluted and eloquent in equal measure.
A stupendous bad-ass.
The clash of history as the past and the present meet. A lot of history I was only vaguely aware of. Thanks again, Mr. S, for bringing me up to speed.
The first time I tried to read this book, I could not do it. I lost interest before I could keep all the characters straight. I finally tried again and made it through. While I loved Snow Crash and Diamond Age, I just have a hard time with his longer stories. The story telling, as always, is good and meaty, complex. I enjoyed the story, but I still felt at some point like I was slogging through to make it to the end. I think editors must be loathe to trim Mr. Stephenson's books due to his success, or perhaps it's just too difficult with so much going on. Good read, but be prepared for a long read.
Picked up for a quid at a library book sale. I had not realised it was 20 or so years old already. Thankfully the tech side has not dated too much - I wonder what it would have to say on NFTs and digital currency now?
Cracking read - don't be put off by the heft
Cracking read - don't be put off by the heft
This was a tough book to rate. There were sections that were absolutely marvellous and exciting and a few characters that I really came to enjoy. However, in a book with dozens of characters, almost all of who are sexist males (implicitly or explicitly), there's also a lot of time spent with characters I simply couldn't stand - meaning many sections of the text were at best dull. Stephenson also has these excessive tangents about the most inane topics in order to describe a single characteristic of an individual - like pages on how a character eats his cereal - that I guess is supposed to help develop the character or endear us to him or something, but instead just left me exhausted. The mammoth work does have many gleaming gems in its center (figurative and literal) but you have to slog through a lot to get to them.