Erez Schatz's profile

77 ratings (3.56 avg)
37 reviews
46 trivia answers

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Erez is currently reading

	07/17 Erez is currently reading: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Paperback) by Douglas R. Hofstadter bookshelves: currently-reading, non-fiction	my rating:
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	07/13 Erez is currently reading: A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (Paperback) by Stephen W. Hawking bookshelves: currently-reading, non-fiction	my rating:
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	07/09 Erez is currently reading: The C Programming Language (2nd Edition) by Brian W. Kernighan bookshelves: currently-reading, programming, reference	my rating:
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Erez's recent updates (rss)

July 24, 2008

Erez Schatz gave

to:
Cryptonomicon (Paperback)
by Neal Stephenson
bookshelves: own-it

my rating:

recommended for: no-one in particular
read in July, 2008

Erez said: "Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming says, that any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. (Including Common Lisp, added Robert Morris)
Lisp, ...more Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming says, that any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. (Including Common Lisp, added Robert Morris)
Lisp, to qoute L. Peter Deutsch, can make you realise that software could be close to executable mathematics.

Cryptonomicon is surprisingly similar to the previous paragraph, both as an analogy to the book, and for the useless use of computer-based qoute, just for the sake of it.

To start with, this book is way.... too.... long.

Just way too long. No real way of getting around it.
Cryptonomicon fails to carry its own weight, even if it didn't have so much of it.
It *is* a page-turner, which is good, seeing as it has so much of those, but more because there is very little actual content. Rather than drawing you in, it lets you drift over; instead of using the breadth of scope to mean something, it really doesn't.

The 2 WWII parts are more of a time-line rather than a story, and the third part, the actual story, is very weak, and no real connections other than some obvious ones, that is, don't expect any last minute golden thread that will tie it all.
There is a lot of fanfare around and in the book, and there's a whole lot of research thrown in for good measure, but there isn't much of a point, where you surface out of a 10 page description that is painstakingly detailed, with as much story in it, as if you took a break and went to read an encyclopaedia. Other such detailed descriptions include a 5 pager about the cars going in or out, a pornographic description of cereal eating, each of those gives the reader no added value other than to be impressed by the writer's way around words, which a good editor would've red-marked away had this been a debut piece.

Characteristics is shoddy, which is amazing for such a large novel. With 1100+ pages in paperback, some character development is expected, but characters here rarely act, and mostly react, being moved from place to place by the circumstances and the background characters that appear and disappear, without any excuse than the sake of pushing the plot forward, toward a very dull and, strangely enough, rushed, ending, which is not ever partially a conclusion and is an ending simply because the book ends there, leaving many threads hanging in mid-air. The only glimpses the author allows us into the mind of the characters is when a mathematical, military, or technological problem is in need of being solved. Other than that, there is a lot of inner monologue, but hardly any glimpses into the actual "inner" parts, resulting in characters moving from one state of mind to another with little to no reasoning.

This is a book that haven't decided whether it wants to be "techy" or about technology, resulting in parts "for the layman" and parts that demand some knowledge in computer tech to understand.
This is a book that attempts to tell us a lot, which is basically how good is the author in finding yet another meaningless, but semantically cool, metaphor.

This is a book that might've been, minus about 400-500 redundant pages and plus about 100 pages to close the remaining threads, a fun, intelligent read. At current state, its a smart-alek, overly self-important, and hardly elegant. (less) "

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July 17, 2008

Erez Schatz gave

to:
Dune (Mass Market Paperback)
by Frank Herbert
bookshelves: fantasy, own-it, science-fiction

my rating:

read in April, 1996

Erez said: "Read without the sequels, it's a triumph. The true space-opera merge of Science fiction and fantasy of a grand scale. Read with the sequels, especially of the recent atrocities, and its a book that shouldn't have been written. "

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Erez Schatz gave

to:
The Lord of the Rings (Paperback)
by J.R.R. Tolkien
bookshelves: classics, fantasy, own-it

my rating:

Erez said: "It's the Lord of the Rings. The mother of all fantasy epics. The great tale of the war between light and darkness. Or a really heavy description of how a few small people managed to nearly botch the world because the really great ones were too scared...more "

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July 04, 2008

Erez Schatz gave

to:
Catch-22 (Paperback)
by Joseph Heller

my rating:

read in January, 1994

Erez said: "This is one of those books that is too popular for its own good. It's not really understood much, and not appreciated for the right reasons. If you think you understood it, read it again, and think, why is it written the way it is? You may be surpris...more "

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Erez Schatz gave

to:
The Catcher in the Rye (Paperback)
by J.D. Salinger

my rating:

Erez said: "It's a vibrant portrait of a teenager's angst-eaten soul. And as such is a droll recap of "what I did last summer", only with more cuss-words, too much of teen-angsty-not-really-deep musing and not that well written. "

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Erez Schatz gave

to:
Lord of the Flies (Paperback)
by William Golding

my rating:

Erez said: "It's not a grim dystopian vision. It's a fascist conformist vision. "

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Erez Schatz gave

to:
Dubliners (Paperback)
by James Joyce
bookshelves: classics, own-it

my rating:

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Erez Schatz gave

to:
Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man (Paperback)
by James Joyce
bookshelves: classics, own-it

my rating:

Erez said: "A seminal work with its right leg planted in the more traditional narrative of Dubliners and its left leg making first strides in the Stream-of-Conscience style of Ulysses. A narrative that grows and flourishes along with its main character and a ric...more "

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July 03, 2008

Erez Schatz took the Never-Ending Book Quiz.

questions answered:	60
correct:	46 (76.7%)
skipped:	2
best streak:	15
questions added:	0

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Erez Schatz gave

to:
The Light Fantastic (Discworld, Book 2)
by Terry Pratchett
bookshelves: fantasy, own-it

my rating:

Erez said: "What The Wrath of Khan was to Star Trek, or The Empire Strikes Back to Star Wars, or BlackAdder II to BlackAdder: It is here that Discworld was born as a series. A more cohesive book than The Colour of Magic, with a more streamlined narration and mem...more "

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