Long ago, back in college in fact, I read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.  Great book, I loved every page of it.  Action packed, some interesting mix of religion, philosophy, and science, and alot of SciFi predictions (Gargoyles, the Metaverse, and much more).  After that, I set out to find what else Neal Stephenson had written and came across Cryptonomicon, with some high praise.  I quickly ordered it and started reading it.

Here it is 7 years later and I’ve finally finished it. This book is a hard read.  Entire chapters are completely irrelevant to the story, establishing nothing important and merely setting up the "tone" of future events.  It’s a confusing jumble of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse & Alan Turing in World War II, and his descendant Randall Waterhouse in the present.  Lawrence is cracking codes and working on information theory, while Randall is attempting to build an ISP in the Phillipines.  Other characters emerge across time, Bobby Shaftoe in WW2 and America Shaftoe in the present, but there’s nothing connecting them aside from genetics.  Page after page drones on about strange military operations and math so thick I felt like I was trudging through my calculus textbooks again.

With alot of determination, I finally forced my way through the first 2/3rds of the book, to be rewarded with what finally pulls everything together in the end.  Unfortunately, the book seems to culminate in the mindset of the Journey is more important than the destination, as the end of the book is rather weak compared to the previous contents.  Also, the journey itself is so meandering and barely comprehensible that even that has little value.

The book has its moments, mostly revolving around Bobby Shaftoe, but I’m glad to be done with it and never have to look at it.  After finishing it, I think that the best use of this book is as a book vault safe.
[tag:nealstephenson][tag:cryptonomicon][tag:book]

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