Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

  • Posted by Shaun on November 22nd, 2010 filed in Books
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It has taken many months, but I finally finished Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. The book is a nearly 1100 pages. I have to be honest that it involved a few false starts to really get into this one. I had high hopes as I know of others that have read it and praised the story and I’ve read other books by Stephenson, but the start of the book wasn’t all too good.

The story includes various plot lines following different characters through different times. Much of the book takes place during World War II and the rest during modern times. Even from the beginning it was clear that the characters were related to each other in one way or the other.

By mid-book the story lines start to converge, although, the point of the story was still a bit unclear. I think this has more to do with the voluminous information detailed in each story line. You kind of get lost in the details and lose track of where the entire book is going. It helps to read the book often and consistently, of which I did neither. Real life keeps me pretty busy nowadays.

At the end of the book all of the story lines start to converge. When that happens the missing links are connected and you get a chance to see how it all fits together. Despite my negative comments it was a decent story. There were a couple times where I was intensely interested to see what happens next, but most of the time you’re left just reading the story just to get through it.

The book does leave me wondering how much of the information about things that happened during World War II is real. Plenty of it is familiar, but there are a lot of points that could easily have been made up. I don’t’ really have the time to explore each detail and I’m sure somebody has already done it and posted an article online, but for now I’ll just accept most of it as fiction.

Now that I’ve finished that tome, I’ve moved back yet again to the Three Kingdoms book. I’m on volume three of four and I am determined to finish this book someday. That story is interesting for many reasons including the historical relevance of the events and characters, but the sheer number of names of places and characters is overwhelming. I do my best to keep up with the names, but have decided to reach about each battle and each chapter as if they were separate stories. It’s nearly impossible to keep all of the names in check. The best you can do is to keep the main character names (and there are many of them) in your memory.