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!