I finally finished Neal Stephenson's 915 page tour de force of a novel Cryptonomicon, and a number of superlatives are appropriate: Pynchon-esque, epic, prescient (the book predates Bitcoin by a decade), sprawling, comprehensive, dense, mathematical, and extremely intelligent . . . but I should warn you that it doesn't really pick up until page 850 . . . although if you make it to page 546, then there is a break from the text in the form of some lovely charts, which explain the relationship between code-breaking genius Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse's clarity of mind and frequency of his ejaculations-- including the difference in the sawtooth pattern between visits to the whorehouse and onanistic release and an explanation of how the graphs are differentially complicated by the arrival of his love interest Mary Smith . . . priceless stuff but you have work for it; ten gold bars out of ten.
Just finished it, Neal is the new, old Umberto in terms of vast and useless knowledge. Here's an interesting article I found on learning. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10508406.2011.591717
ReplyDeleteahh . . . maybe i should re-read "foucalt's pendulum." strange that we both finished the book at the same time, perhaps we are in a secret book club.
ReplyDeleteI feel like I should be able to figure out the probability of this after reading Cryptonomicon.
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