Jennifer read and liked Donnagha Dulchaointigh's review of Cryptonomicon:

"I am half-way through Cryptonomicon, and here are my thoughts so far:

1. Where is the storyline? Why no plot? So far, the only moderately compelling story - and this is after 553 pages - is Goto Dengo's accidental encounter with and escape...more I am half-way through Cryptonomicon, and here are my thoughts so far:

1. Where is the storyline? Why no plot? So far, the only moderately compelling story - and this is after 553 pages - is Goto Dengo's accidental encounter with and escape from cannibals on the island of New Guinea. Otherwise, I have been unable to detect a plot anywhere in this book.

2. Neal Stephenson has little narrative skill. He does not seem to know how to describe action so that the reader becomes caught up in the plot. But then again, there is no plot in this book.

3. Neal Stephenson desperately needs an editor. This book would have been more effective had it been one-fifth the length. E.g., is a four-page dissertation on eating a bowl of Cap'n Crunch really necessary? In Anna Karenina, when Tolstoy spent several pages describing Levin's unsuccessful attempts to keep pace with the serfs in mowing and reaping grain, he made an important, poignant point: that Russian landowners could not physically perform the work of souls they owned. But what is the purpose of Stephenson's verbosity in so many passages throughout this novel? Does the reader gather any insight of real value? Or are these passages just so many words?

4. What is the purpose of two separate narratives - one in the 1940s and one in the 1990s? I identify with none of the characters in the 1990s storyline, and this is a fatal flaw of any novel: if the reader cannot identify in any way with the main characters of a story, and especially if the reader neither likes or dislikes any of the main characters - then why read the book?

5. I wish that Stephenson would not try so hard to devise cute metaphors and similes. I find them distracting, forced and at at times puerile.

6. Stephenson has little narrative skill, and his writing has almost no eloquence. I would rather read a much shorter novel that is well written and that conveys a message, than 1000+ pages of logorrhea.

Sorry, I intensely dislike this book. But I intend to finish it, just so that I can tell all who listen how much I detest this book _ and why I find it so ... empty and pointless. After I finish Cryptonomicon, I will return to Gogol, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Melville, Verne, Durrenmatt, Frisch, Kafka, Pushkin, Hawthorne, Joyce, Hugo, Zola, Korolenko, Lu Xun, Yu Hua, Ba Jin, Shen Congwen - in short, writers who actually knew or know how to write ...

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Jennifer read and liked Michael's review of Cryptonomicon:

"My four-star rating will likely puzzle those friends of mine who have had to listen to me piss and moan about this novel for the past six months. My progress as a reader was, shall we say, embarrassingly slow. (In Stephenson's defense, I tended to pu...more My four-star rating will likely puzzle those friends of mine who have had to listen to me piss and moan about this novel for the past six months. My progress as a reader was, shall we say, embarrassingly slow. (In Stephenson's defense, I tended to put his novel aside after every 200 or so pages and read other things; the book actually moves pretty swiftly considering its size.) But the four-star rating is sincere: I did enjoy this very much, for the most part, and I intend to at last read Snow Crash and maybe even finish The Diamond Age, which I abandoned sometime back in the late nineties.

Though this novel is set in the past (and in a present that is quaintly a decade old now), it's by definition a science fiction novel: Ideas and things over people. This one's about a specific process of change in science, and not so much about people save as means of displaying certain ideas at work or in development. (There are some characters who almost achieve a fully rounded quality--Goto Dengo!--but that's not really all that surprising given a thousand pages of storytelling, is it?) So most of this is Stephenson fictionalizing scenes about the development of the information age, essentially saying, "Isn't this incredibly cool?" And it almost always is cool.

And funny.

Stephenson's voice has a kneejerk hyperbolic quality to it that works on a glib, superficial level. His gift for over-the-top metaphor is pretty much consistently astounding and amusing. Even if that same quality of voice never for a moment involves the reader of the reality of this world and it's people. No, the prose is all about braininess and exhibitionistic flaunting of research, ad nauseam, and so what? That's as good a reason to read as any, and this is almost always a good time.

While I never quite felt any of the characters were exactly well-developed outside of their erections and ability to compute, say, the proximate coordinates of a cherished family heirloom, the combined group of characters here give us the most fully fleshed out portrayal of geekitude in literature. Seriously, this is an unparalleled examination of what it is to be a geeky guy in the late twentieth--the love of data and things and problem-solving; the sheer befuddlement in the face of women and their irrational ways; the needlessly-complicated-and-by-the-way-accidentally-insightful manner of apprehending the world that defines several generations of bespectacled men. (It begins in this novel with Waterhouse and Turing and so on and ending with Randy but encompassing even characters such as Shaftoe, who while ostensibly more of a typical man and an a!c!t!i!o!n! hero, is still pretty much free from quaint qualities such as empathy, so women remain mysterious beings who control the world by virtue of their ability to literally screw with men. Sex is a power before which every Stephenson character loses his shit.) (That this is true of most people in the real world doesn't make its universality in a novel an okay thing.)

Of course, the above doesn't much matter in what is essentially a comic novel. Stephenson makes noises about more serious topics (stopping the evilness of war, a potent disgust about the horrors we visit on our fellow humans, etc), but this is just a long caper/heist novel--long on capering and short on import.

But fun! I just wish it hadn't been quite so damned long.(less) "