Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
2000 Locus Award Winner (Review contains spoilers)
This one had been sitting on my shelf for a few years, one day I decided to pick the fattest book on the shelf to make some visible progress, and start reading that. After all the word crypt is in the title, so maybe there is some connection to the Undead, what with the Necronomicon being a likely reference as well.
The book appears to be set in two different places, times and characters, alternating chapters. The first is in the period of World War II, and the other we'll call late 1990's when the internet was looking to become the next big thing. The first is looking at some of the genius minds that looked at military codes and broke the ENIGMA code, oh, cryptography, right. And the second is looking at some Americans starting up an ISP in more legally loose Panama.
I confess, I did not finish this book. Not even close, it turned into quite the slog and it was utterly boring. After getting probably a third of the way through the sizeable paperback, and dreading facing any more, I decided life is too short to waste time finding out what happened next. In that aspect at least this book is significant in that it taught me that my challenge in reading through this list of Award-Winning books shouldn't be a jail sentence. It was to expand my reading and to find what I like, and don't like. I tried reading this, and I have discovered that I like big-idea, hard, science fiction.
To be fair, the writing style was quite good and the imagery was effective, I had no trouble picturing anything. The author is, clearly, a good writer. But the story lacked any sci-fi elements, or even plot hooks that could capture my imagination. It was, as near as I could tell, nothing but historical fiction. Chances are that the two different settings would eventually come together somehow, and maybe it was skilfully done, but I didn't get to it, nor was I interested in hanging around until it showed up.
All in all, just not the book or story for me. There was nothing at all that I found interesting or thought-provoking, no characters that interested me. I can't even think of who to recommend this to, my take away lesson is that I can be a bit more brutal in culling what I read.1/5