Reading the Chunksters discussion

Lorna wrote: "they are about to put out an APB on it"

Watch out, they may send Bobby Shaftoe and the rest of the guys from Detachment 2702 to ram a boat into the side of your house and storm in and grab the book, or maybe Goto Dengo will tunnel underneath your building and come up through the floor when you are least expecting it :)

I've just read RETURN and CRIBS. I thought RETURN was longer than it needed to be, and slow. But I loved the part about the ants and how the jungle is basically ant-world with all other species including humans having walk-on parts. And yes I agree with you, Lorna, about the virgin thing!

CRIBS is a WWII chapter in which Waterhouse sneaks up on Rudy in the Philippines. This chapter answered a few questions for me, including what the submarines were doing, which probably should have been obvious but wasn't. I'm still not sure why the Germans would want to send their gold all that distance and put it into the hands of the Japanese...? Maybe because they knew they were losing in Europe, but they thought the Japanese would hold out? But didn't this operation start back in 1942 or 1943?

Anyway, it seems like all the characters in both time frames are now approaching Golgotha where the gold is buried...

Lorna wrote: "I am posting early because I have to return my library book today because I have renewed it a million times and they are about to put out an APB on it."

Lol Lorna!! :D And I also loved the part where Lawrence wished he could ask Mary. :)

Rosemary, good question about sending the gold to Japan. I assumed it was to get it out of Europe for fear of losing, but that doesn't make sense if it was started a couple years earlier.

I finished the book before New Years, but without referencing my book I don't remember the chapters at the moment so I will wait to comment until others have caught up and finished.

I've finished too! *** Spoilers follow ***

CAYUSE involves landmines, an arrow, and Randy's old enemy, Andrew Loeb. He doesn't seem a very convincing character to me - maybe because we've hardly seen him, he's always been in the background, so having him pop up suddenly here seemed contrived.

BLACK CHAMBER has Waterhouse and Goto Dengo conspiring to warn Rudy that his messages have been intercepted by Comstock. This is where we learn why the Arethusa messages were never decoded.

PASSAGE has Rudy and Bischoff in the submarine U-Million (the one that Doug's company discovered). One of the two of them escapes ...

LIQUIDITY is the last chapter. Randy, Amy, and the gang are blockaded above the gold with Wing tunnelling towards it from his neighbouring land. Randy is now world-famous (I'm not sure how this is all suddenly public) and he does something with a pressurized explosion that brings all the gold to the surface and liquifies it.

So at the end, as I understand it, Epiphyte have possession of the gold on the surface where they can collect it. Wing and his diggers will never reach it, even if they weren't killed in the blast. Which hopefully they weren't - but this doesn't seem to be an issue for anyone.

It would be great to discuss the book as a whole a little bit. My first thoughts are very simple: I really enjoyed the WWII parts, but the 1990s parts not so much.

I hated the proposal scene. Amy cries? Why? Because she is totally overwhelmed by the fact that such an amazing guy as Randy wants to marry her? Because he didn't bother to ask what she thought about the idea? Or because she has an arrow in her leg? :(

I wasn't at all impressed with the ending in general, in fact, but looking around online, Stephenson has a reputation for writing very poor endings. Lorna, if the library police came for your book before you finished, I don't think you missed much :)

Thank you for the chapter recaps, Rosemary!

I agree with you about Andrew Loeb, that he didn't seem like a "real" character to me given we barely saw him, but I guess I wasn't too surprised when I found out it was him who was shooting the arrows all crazily. Still, when it was revealed that it was him, I had thought "oh yeah, I forgot about that guy!".

I liked the Black Chamber chapter as it all made sense now why the Arethusa messages could not be decoded. I loved how Lawrence came up with that idea.

The Passage chapter was heartbreaking. I didn't understand why Rudy had to die. Couldn't he have also escaped but also have destroyed the paper? (and now I can't even remember what it was that had to be destroyed...)

In Liquidity it also went over my head why Randy is all famous. Because they discovered and recovered all this gold? If that is the reason, do they not all become famous, then? Amy, Doug, Avi, etc.

The Amy crying part, I don't remember the specifics now! Maybe it was because Randy finally "came around" and mustered up the courage to actually act upon his feelings instead of tiptoeing around and wondering and letting Amy take the lead?

I liked the book overall and gave it 4 stars. Much of it was exciting or humorous or intriguing enough to make me look forward to reading each week's sections. I definitely liked the WWII parts the best (and not only because of Bobby Shaftoe!), but I also like the 1990s parts, just not as much.

I was also not impressed with the ending. I felt it was very anti-climatic. It seemed like everything kind of gradually slowed down after Bobby exited the book, although the scene with Rudy and Bischoff in the sub was pretty good. This book is a good example of being an "enjoy the journey" type with the ending not really a destination to look forward to.

I have also read that Stephenson is not very good with his endings, and I very much agree with that for this book. But I'm trying to remember how I felt about the endings of his other books that I've read. The most recent was Reamde and I remember feeling pretty satisfied at the end. The heart-pounding action continued for a fair bit towards the end, yet the ending still satisfactorily wrapped up a bunch of threads. Anathem also had a good ending, if I remember correctly. Seveneves I think could go into the not-so-great ending category.

Lorna wrote: "I'm not finished I just finished BLACK CHAMBER so I skipped over those chapter reviews, but think Amy was crying because she was thinking of the future lost because now she was hurt. Now I'm curiou..."

It struck me as rather like the virgin thing. Randy doesn't ask her to marry him, he says "I want you to marry me," as if his wishes are all that matters. At no point does she say yes or no, she just says sarcastically "Well, that's very romantic," then bursts into tears like a heroine in a 1970s Harlequin novel being swept off her feet by a millionaire. I didn't picture Amy that way.

But it's possible she cries because she has an arrow in her leg and it's painful, although I would have imagined curses rather than tears. Or from frustration because he picked such a bad moment. Or a mixture of all these things.

So is she going to marry him or not? In the last chapter he's obviously expecting she will, and it's like she doesn't need to answer, because women are always so grateful to be proposed to, right? Especially a Filipino woman who has a chance to marry an American...

I didn't really think this was the big deal that I am making it sound, but it was an example of the way in which things were left hanging at the end.

I agree with you, Linda, it's a book where the journey matters more than the destination. I'm glad to have read it, and grateful to have read it with you!

I admit, I did not think too much into the proposal scene at the time. I didn't even remember exactly when it happened until you mentioned it occurred after she got hit with the arrow. I can see the scene as a Harlequin romance novel now that you describe it that way, Rosemary - the virgin being swept off her feet and rescued by her "hero". The only thing that resembled Amy at that moment was that she was being sarcastic by pointing out how romantic it was.

I assume that she is going to marry Randy, because to me it was obvious she liked him well enough to fly to the states and take that car trip with him and meet his family. I think she was frustrated in that he couldn't admit his own feelings freely and out in the open. Maybe that is why she started crying when he stated that he wanted to marry her? That he finally reached that point in saying out loud how he felt about her. I guess that was my intuitive take on the scene, but I can see how it can be viewed in different lights.

Thank you for reading along with me as well, Rosemary! And thank you to Lorna for leading the discussion and also to Marie for reading along and discussing the book. It was a fun journey! :)

I finished! Better late than never. I think goto dengo had the best ending of all the characters. I just loved that he ended up being successful after all that he went through. Although, Rudy’s dramatic end in the submarine was pretty thrilling too.

Overall, I agree with you guys about the proposal. It wasn’t my favorite part and getting more details about their relationship made it seem even more confusing that Amy got all jealous earlier. It just seemed like they were admitting their feelings at the end, so why she went to see him because she was jealous, I didn’t understand.

I also agree that the story was more about the journey than the ending. I just didn’t feel any real closure at the end even though they found the gold. I still had too many questions.

I thought this was a good book, but sometimes Stevenson seemed to skip over things that made some story lines hard to follow like the one with amy and randy. Anyways, this was fun even though I missed the last couple weeks. I hope I will see you all again in a future read. :)

Marie wrote: "I finished! Better late than never. I think goto dengo had the best ending of all the characters. I just loved that he ended up being successful after all that he went through."

Yay Marie! It sounds like we all had similar thoughts regarding this book. And yes, I was happy that Goto ended up being so successful after all that. :)

I just started listening to the audibook of Stephenson's newest book - Fall, or Dodge in Hell. It has the same MC and a few other characters that were in Reamde. Anyway, there is now mention of the Waterhouse/Shaftoe clan! The characters have not actually made an appearance, but apparently the Waterhouse family foundation has gotten into brain research. Epiphyte (the cryptocurrency company) and the Waterhouse foundation occupy several floors in a downtown Seattle building, where there is also a museum of sorts that contains photos of Lawrence, Rudy and Turing and the machine which is able to read the metal cards that were recovered.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty cool since this was the last Stephenson book I read! If you guys have a chance, you should definitely check out Reamde, it's quite the thriller. And so far I'm loving the premise of Fall, which starts out sort of SciFi, but will apparently turn more Fantasy as the book progresses.

Lorna wrote: "I love word scrambles and I think it is a message from the author when you scramble Reamde you can spell Read me :)"

Yes, that is exactly what the title implies. :)

Lol. OK, more about the new book, Fall, and its characters. Don't read on if you plan on reading the book want it to be a surprise, but it's not really a spoiler.




So, Enoch Root just showed up in this book, much later in time... He says "As far as I can make out, I'm an emissary of sorts from another plane of existence....The problem is, I can't seem to remember it too well..."