Reading 1001 discussion

read 2016, A story set in alternating time periods of WWII and the nineties during the internet boom. It is a story of cryptography and high tech finance with a scoop of military adventure, conspiracies and great escapes. The back of my book states imagine Tom Clancy, William Gibson and James Michener working together and you get the idea.

I really enjoyed this book and it was not painful to read this 1130 page book. In fact it reads pretty fast. I started in March but really I didn’t get past 16% until June. Stephonson’s story is engaging. His prose and humor are great. I love the characters, great characters that the reader feels invested in and therefore the difficulties and great escapes are thrilling. The characters of the nineties are connected to the characters of WWII only they don’t know how connected they really are. Randall Waterhouse is one of the main characters and he comes to know himself and grows in the process. This is not just a character driven book and probably more a plot driven book. It is engaging and could be called a page turner. Themes involve war and the damage done to people, codes and breaking codes and the dangers in our high tech lives. This quote pretty much sums it up; “Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks.” I think that the detail of the math and art of code was very interesting. You do not need to be great at math to enjoy this book. The author includes an appendix with details on how the Solitaire Code works.

Cryptonomicon is a book full of tangents and rambling discussions about bicycles, code breaking, church organs, and money. There are two layers to the book, one taking place during world war II and one taking place in the modern world (at the time of the writing). The characters are all related and there is some fun for the reader in matching their characteristics over the two different time periods. As it is a long book, I found myself being drawn to being in the world of the book and getting to know the characters. I found the second half of the book to be more engaging than the first part where I was just getting to know the characters. However, in the end, I was left thinking that for all my engagement, that there really wasn't much substance to the book even though it was quite erudite. In the end I was disappointed.

Rating: 2.5 stars

This was a let-down for me. I have wanted to read this for so long and was sure I would love it based upon all of the glowing reviews. Page after page I hoped if would suddenly click and become more interesting, but it never did. I had hoped at least the ending would tie it all in and give me that "aha" moment I had been working for during the last several hundred pages, but, no. Instead, I find myself reading an abrupt and anticlimactic ending that made me wonder what just happened. Clearly not my kind of book.

Pre-2016 review:

****

This sprawling techno-thriller uses four narrative threads (three during World War II, one in the late 90s) to retrace a gold stockpile abandoned in the Philippines towards the end of World War II. At the heart of this story are all the cryptographic efforts, both past and present, to ensure that almost nobody knows of the existence of this stockpile. Stephenson writes this novel in a nerdish, punkish manner, and creates several hilarious passages (Bobby Shaftoe's gung-ho character features in many of these), while maintaining interest through this four-pronged plot where facts and links are discovered layer by layer. While some people might be afraid by the mathematical aspects of parts of the novel, I believe that it was written to appeal the non-mathematical minds while titillating the already-converted and pushing them to dig further into some of the more arcane concepts exposed (Van Eck phreaking and zeta functions, anyone?). Very entertaining page-turner, with very few boring moments.