Some books take a little more effort to chew through, and I felt like Cryptonomicon was definitely one of them. Aside from keeping up with all the threads from three separate narratives taking place over the course of World War 2 era battlefronts and the South Pacific in the late 20th century, you’ve also got the super-dense business of cryptology to understand. Stephenson was hit or miss with me in explaining some of the complex math behind cryptosystems. Sometimes, he took pages to delve into the particulars and illustrate the concepts using metaphors, and it worked extremely well. I was not only interested, but felt smarter and understood the stakes in the books better. In other scenes, it was too dense or obtuse and bogged down the narrative.

That aside, I enjoyed reading the book, if only for Stephenson’s fantastic descriptions of action. There are quite a few laugh out loud moments in the book, in which he describes something in a way that instantly flashes a perfect picture of what he was trying to communicate, and done in a way that not many authors have a gift for. Equally as humorous is the way all of his solitary, often socially inept characters collide and maneuver around each other – all math nerds and computer geeks thrust into a critical role in war, a space typically reserved for the brave and physically strong.

The biggest thing that didn’t work for me in this book was the pacing – there were many sections of the book that felt extremely slow and drawn out, Stephenson probably could have achieved a story that resonated just as well, if not more so, with a book easily a third less in length. I found myself not caring what happened in the book or what happened to the characters for long stretches of time before I’d hit another section that felt engrossing.