Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is the most complicated book I’ve read by him, and that’s saying something. 

Trying to explain the damned thing is going to give me a headache. 

The book follows multiple POV characters, though three of them are the primaries: 1) Randy Waterhouse who is on the current timeline when the book is written, 2) Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse who is Randy’s grandfather and a really smart, socially awkward guy who gets sent to war, and 3) Bobby Shaftoe who is a Marine who is not socially awkward and was waiting on the war to arrive. 

The book has multiple, weaving narratives (not terribly unlike Cloud Atlas) that deal with the theme of keeping other people from knowing what you want to do while trying to figure out what they’re doing. 

Can we just say it’s a book about game theory?

It’s a sprawl of a book that took more than two months to read because I was meandering at the start. I really spent about 6 or so weeks just to hit 200-something pages. I covered the rest of the 700 (dense AF) pages in the last couple of weeks. 

This is a heavy book. Literally. 

As with any Stephenson book I’ve read, it’s a mix of plot and explaining things so you can have a vague appreciation of some things that happen in the plot (and maybe for him to show off a little; I’m still undecided on that). 

The book is weird. It stays that way most of the time, but especially before you really get rolling, it’s hard to figure out what the hell is going on.

I’m still in the habit of not reading descriptions before I start books, so I don’t really know what the book’s going to be about. When you have a complicated book switching timelines and POV characters, that can be a bit much to start. But it’s fun. 

Somewhere in the middle, I really started to appreciate the beauty of the book. I don’t think the ending is as solid as the rest of the book is, but it’s not a letdown. It’s hard to wrap up something this complicated. 

And that gets to something that I didn’t realize until I googled a character’s name: This book is sort of a part of a series. 

Published later, Stephenson published a three-part Baroque Cycle series that deals with… Something. I’m not going to look because I still want to be surprised. BUT when you google a character’s name and there are connections to other books, the other books show up. 

Quicksilver is the first in that series and I already owned it not knowing they were connected, so hopefully that series holds up to this book. 

Like he did in Snow Crash, Stephenson had some prescience in his topics. I understand if he printed it in a book, odds are other people were thinking the same thing, but some of our current technologies are products of Star Trek ideas, so you never know when the tail will wag the dog. 

In this case, he kept things very heavily steeped in encryption and threw in a dash of cryptocurrency that actually freaked me out a little when I read it knowing the book is 20 years old now. 

My favorite thing about his books might be that the first one I read is the probably the worst one I read. And it was a very good book. 

Anathem is probably my favorite and Snow Crash is the quickest read. Use those as guidelines however you will if you’re looking to try one of his books. 

But with that, I think I’m going to read some YA fantasy to get rid of this headache.