Skip to main content

When code breaks

I just finished reading Neal Stephensons book Cryptonomicon. It waited a long time on my reading list and I had high expectations for it. 

There is a lot going on in the book right from the start. It's a bit hard to get grasp of all the different timelines and characters, but after a while it all becomes familiar enough to follow through. It even gives high hopes for where this story is heading.

There is also a lot of subject matter included. So if you are not that interested in cryptography or computing in general this might be a bit too much. There is also a lot of history, however liberally used, mostly from the World War II era and it's also mainly focused on those two subjects.

Unfortunately Stephensons writing can be quite wordy at times stretching this book into near thousand pages. It also leaves too little time to pull all the plots together at the end or giving hastily conclusion to those intriguing sidetracks. It would have been better to make it into trilogy as so many does. Give the story more time to grow. Or alternatively focus on the story instead of describing the nature of the Pacific for several pages in a row.

 

 

Category