Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
I feel like I'm coming down with something. Bleargh.
I quite liked Snow Crash. I've picked up and put down Stephenson's more recent works, but their sheer size put me off. But, I was going to PAX and I had long hours waiting in airports on planes and in queues ahead of me, so an easy-to-read brick was just what I wanted in a book.
First off, this is a brick. At over 1100 pages, there is a certain amount of arrogance, I feel, for an author to plonk this down in front of a reader and expect them to plough through it. And until now, I simply haven't been bothered. I liked Snow Crash. I didn't like it that much.
Now that I have read it, I can honestly say it could have used trimming. Some of the Melville-esque digressions were interesting, but it was only through luck of coinciding interests, and it read like the author showing off more often than not.
That being said, Stephenson's pretty sharp, and some of his ideas were remarkably prescient (online currencies, for one.) All of them were relatively interesting. There are really two storylines in this book; one taking place in the then-present 1999, and the other set in WW2 and of them both, I actually preferred the former. I guess there's no mystery as to how WW2 turned out.
It's about war gold. And cryptography. And business law. Trying to summarise the plot is almost impossible. There's a large cast of characters, most of them male and all the viewpoint characters are male. I didn't really notice this until about 4/5ths of the way through the book, when I realised all the female characters with any page time ended up pregnant, save one, and I expected her to be expecting by the end of the book (she wasn't.) A great deal of the book is set in the Philippines, but there are no Philippino characters. Just white guys. Just Americans. None of them particularly memorable, either.
Buried in this book is a decent adventure story, and some interesting ideas and meditations of cryptography and the internet. But I won't be reading another brick like this one. It just ain't gold.
I quite liked Snow Crash. I've picked up and put down Stephenson's more recent works, but their sheer size put me off. But, I was going to PAX and I had long hours waiting in airports on planes and in queues ahead of me, so an easy-to-read brick was just what I wanted in a book.
First off, this is a brick. At over 1100 pages, there is a certain amount of arrogance, I feel, for an author to plonk this down in front of a reader and expect them to plough through it. And until now, I simply haven't been bothered. I liked Snow Crash. I didn't like it that much.
Now that I have read it, I can honestly say it could have used trimming. Some of the Melville-esque digressions were interesting, but it was only through luck of coinciding interests, and it read like the author showing off more often than not.
That being said, Stephenson's pretty sharp, and some of his ideas were remarkably prescient (online currencies, for one.) All of them were relatively interesting. There are really two storylines in this book; one taking place in the then-present 1999, and the other set in WW2 and of them both, I actually preferred the former. I guess there's no mystery as to how WW2 turned out.
It's about war gold. And cryptography. And business law. Trying to summarise the plot is almost impossible. There's a large cast of characters, most of them male and all the viewpoint characters are male. I didn't really notice this until about 4/5ths of the way through the book, when I realised all the female characters with any page time ended up pregnant, save one, and I expected her to be expecting by the end of the book (she wasn't.) A great deal of the book is set in the Philippines, but there are no Philippino characters. Just white guys. Just Americans. None of them particularly memorable, either.
Buried in this book is a decent adventure story, and some interesting ideas and meditations of cryptography and the internet. But I won't be reading another brick like this one. It just ain't gold.