Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die discussion

My geeky tendencies loved this book. =) I also loved the character development. It was a loooooong and heavy read though. Not exactly the greatest book to haul around during my commute. whew! =)

I've read this book several times, and I think it's a great cross-geek read: you can be a geek and love it and you can not identify as a geek and love it. A sci-fi fan recommended it to me at first, but the story is so far richer than a basic sci-fi yarn.

I might have to find my copy and read it again!

I eagerly bought this book a couple of years back, but have yet to read it! And now all the more so coz my husband has read it and he keeps talking about it!!

I loved this book. I was the typical sci-fi geek lured to it by Stephenson's previous work with Snowcrash and Diamond Age. I had no idea what was in store for me. Such a great mix of history, cryptography, and story-telling packed into this weighty tome.

If readers enjoy this and weren't put off by the thickness then I would heartily recommend his Baroque Cycle, a trilogy of books dealing with the birth of science as midwifed by Newton, Leibniz, Huygens, Hooke, and Boyle. Readers of Cryptonomicon will recognize the return of the family Shaftoe as well.

Logan, did you read the whole Baroque Cycle? I read Quicksilver but afterwards never had the 'courage' to start the second book. Quicksilver was alright but not incredibly great to me and those books are really really thick!

Yeah, I finally sat down and immersed myself in the entire Baroque Cycle last Spring. It's unfortunate that Quicksilver was the first in the series, because it's also the hardest one to really get into. The Confusion was a lot of fun, it mainly follows Jack Shaftoe as he tries to make his way back to England in a very round-about manner and doesn't have as much of Daniel Waterhouse and his hand wringing. It was definitely worthwhile to read in its entirety once, but it'll at least be a decade or two before I attempt that feat again.

This book was totally awesome! Some of the war stuff reminded me of Ernest Hemingway.

I thought it was a great book but it was such a long and arduous read that it has kept me from picking up any of his latest works.

What did you like about it?

I read Ready Player One last year and this kind of makes me think of that, but much heavier on the history and much more involved in the mathy geekiness. The nerd/geek in me devoured it.... although the number and interactions of characters was rather confusing. I enjoyed reading it, although I'm not chomping at the bit to start another one.

I thought I saw that some of his other books have some of the same characters, or at least the same families? If that's the case, are they a series, or companion books?