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A review by mathematicalcoffee
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
1.0
OK Neal Stephenson, we're done! I only read this book because in a past moment of folly I spent 1 precious audible credit on it. The only of his books I could recommend is the first half of Seveneves (it seems pretty clearly made up of a book and a sequel in one).
You'd think it'd be a book about codebreaking in WWII and maybe some cool maths or codes or a cool codebreaking technology but no, it turns out to be a treasure hunt where the main character, just when his crypto company is about to go under for lack of cash, just so happens to find an encoded message in his grandma's attic with the coordinates of some buried gold and hey presto, they go there and find the gold. yep. It's one of those books that doesn't have a clear plot but rather events just happen to the main characters, which I don't mind (A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet for example); but the resulting anecdotes/self-reflections are not interesting and frankly creepy - reads like teenage Neal Stephenson fantasising about masturbation, a man's need for it, the frequency of such, the conspiracy of women monitoring and policing such, women in black stockings, sex on old furniture, .... yep. gross. The female characters are only there to be fantasised vividly about and the modern-day protagonists don't actually _do_ anything.
45 HOURS of my life I won't get back lol.
You'd think it'd be a book about codebreaking in WWII and maybe some cool maths or codes or a cool codebreaking technology but no, it turns out to be a treasure hunt where the main character, just when his crypto company is about to go under for lack of cash, just so happens to find an encoded message in his grandma's attic with the coordinates of some buried gold and hey presto, they go there and find the gold. yep. It's one of those books that doesn't have a clear plot but rather events just happen to the main characters, which I don't mind (A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet for example); but the resulting anecdotes/self-reflections are not interesting and frankly creepy - reads like teenage Neal Stephenson fantasising about masturbation, a man's need for it, the frequency of such, the conspiracy of women monitoring and policing such, women in black stockings, sex on old furniture, .... yep. gross. The female characters are only there to be fantasised vividly about and the modern-day protagonists don't actually _do_ anything.
45 HOURS of my life I won't get back lol.