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Comment by icosahedron | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I hope it continues to live up to the hype you've heard. I had a hard letdown, but I hope that doesn't happen for you.

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I tried to read Cryptonomicon as a first introduction to Stephenson. Kept waiting for the good parts, and actually just stopped reading halfway through out of sheer boredom.

A few years later and I read Seveneves. Absolutely fall in love, and read Anathem right after. Loved it too.

To this day I still don’t understand why the first book felt so boring and the others didn’t. To make it worse, when you go looking for a synopsis of Cryptonomicon, everyone is so vague!

Check out Snowcrash! I liked Snowcrash but thought Cryptonomicon was incredibly boring as well.

I’ll have to do this then, thanks!

haha! I felt the same way about Seveneves, although I guess that doesn’t have as much hype. The premise for the opening chapter was so cool, and then the exhaustive descriptions of spaceships and orbital mechanics and what not was just too dry. Maybe I’ll give it another attempt in a few years.

I stopped halfway through and tried reading the sparknotes to see if anything exciting ends up happening but I ended up getting bored and let down just reading those highlights.

That said, maybe I was expecting something very different. I enjoyed Snowcrash and I enjoyed various sections of Cryptonomicon’s prose, it was just sooooo boring in the end.

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