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Comment by wsintra2022 | Hacker News Reader

wsintra2022

Came across that book just recently in one of those free book libraries, tell me, was it a good read?

Cryptonomicon is one of the best reads on the planet, it's famous.

Is it now, though? I read it and didn't manage to get into it much, and don't really remember anything from it.

I think it's one of those works of art that were so revolutionary that they started a whole genre, but now they seem badly done and clichéd just because everyone has copied them and iterated on them.

I found it witty and somewhat educational, but man is it long. I read it on the kindle and when I thought that I must be getting close to the end, I had only read 30% of it. It takes some determination to get through.

After the novel itself ends, there's quite a bit of additoinal material.

Yeah, it's been a while since I read it, but I did find it to be a slog.

Some of the tech's a bit long-in-the-tooth (the whole data haven concept), but the genre was already well-established when the book turned up (Gravity's Rainbow (1973) in particular and postmodern literature in general). I, personally, enjoy it.

I got about halfway through and forgot I was in the middle of reading it. The story never really grabbed me. I say this as someone who usually rips through a book a week.

It is a story of technology and history. It grew out of the author's interest in the way we communicate, and also out of his interest in WWII legends. It's huge, and hugely readable. It's a very good read if the intersection of those things interest you.

I've read it probably a dozen times or more. I'm actually mid-way through it again after not having read it for a year or two.

I think it's still a great story. The technology is definitely dated.

There is also some language that will offend or make some people uncomfortable (Racial slurs epithets, among them).

If you're a computer nerd, yes, definitely.

There are plenty of people I wouldn't recommend it to, though.

A lot of my guy friends have a crush on a lead character in it (not Elias or Elon, but a similar name?) and praise it extensively. I apparently read it one time and remember nothing about it, so YMMV but if you’re into hacker guys, you’ll apparently love it!

Enoch Root?

Enoch! Yes!

Yes, it's an amazing book. But skip the last 20 pages, they're deeply unsatisfying writing.

The Neal Stephenson experience.

That, and the 20-page grad-level dissertation on some esoteric subject randomly in the middle of the book.

The man’s truly one of the best out there, and I’m convinced a more aggressive editor would ruin him, but it wouldn’t be a Stephenson without some real head scratching authorial decisions.

So true about the endings! And he's actually aware of it.

    Well, I'm reasonably happy with all of my endings, but I know that some people feel differently. But as you've noticed, they're different, it's not always the same thing. All I can say is different books end in different ways, and different people have different tastes in what they want to see. I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of some of my books. But I also think that it's one of these things where people's preconceived ideas sometimes drive the way they perceive things. ...

    So I think that my experience is that once you've written a book with a controversial ending and that meme gets going of Stephenson can't write endings, then that gets slapped on to everything you do, no matter how elaborate the ending is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE&t=654s

It’s not a meme, the man really can’t write an ending to save his life. But generally the pages other than the last ~25 make it totally worth it (other than that post-death MMORPG book, that one was terrible and just a slog the whole way through).

Have you read Termination Shock, and if so, how do you feel it stacks up? It was, regrettably, my first (and still only) Stephenson book, and I thought it was really quite bad in all the ways that matter to me. (The action was good, but I don't read sci-fi for the action.) But I see so much love for him in hacker circles online that I wave on whether or not I should give his more famous works some attention.

Termination shock wasn’t great, no - Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future was a much better work in that vein. I think Cryptonomicon is very good, I really liked Seveneves, Anathem is fantastic, and I liked REAMDE as well, as far as his latter day works go. Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are what made him famous and are both Very good, if a bit dated now.

> other than that post-death MMORPG book, that one was terrible and just a slog the whole way through

Literally everything about that book except the main plot was fantastic. It read terrifyingly prophetic once he could peel himself away from whatever greek fable bullshit he was on about on the main thread.

That, and the 20-page grad-level dissertation on some esoteric subject randomly in the middle of the book.

This made me smile because while I enjoyed Seveneves there was an entire interlude discussing swarms of spacecraft cooperating to avoid debris.

Pynchon always managed to integrate this tendency into the narrative much better. Stephenson is still worth it tho.

I still can’t quite place his digression on monads in The Baroque Cycle.

Don't forget the cereals!

I have read and can recommend everything by the author between and not including 'The Big U' and 'REAMDE'.

REAMDE disappointed me so much, that I haven't touched his later novels.

'Snow Crash' reads like a graphic novel, 'Anathem' is just unique and maybe in my fav top 10 (not considering 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' :), 'Cryptonomicon' + 'The Baroque Cycle' are slow but very rewarding.

'The Diamond Age', what can I say, do yourself a favour and start reading it now.

Sure I forgot one or two, it's been a long time.

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