divine angst

Man, I’m really falling behind on this Book Challenge thing. Whatever, we moved and reading has been falling by the wayside—or, rather, has become something I try to catch 30 minutes of before going to sleep at night, between working all day, cooking dinner, spending time with my husband, doing laundry, and (oy) reading blogs. Also, I read magazines at the pool because I don’t care if they get wet and I can read little snippets in between tanning rotations.

Not that I’m trying to excuse myself for falling down on the book challenge thing. Or maybe I am.

In any case, here’s my review of my latest read.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

So this was a re-read for me. I read it the first time on our honeymoon, starting it about two days before we left Italy, when I finished the books I’d brought/bought, and finishing it on the flight home. International flights are great for reading.

I liked the book then, but I wanted to revisit it, hoping to pick up some of the subtleties I missed the first time. Knowing what happens in the end helps with these kinds of books, I find, because you enjoy picking up the clues even more. Besides, this book isn’t much about the suspense of the story, it’s more about the journey.

And that’s the crux of my only gripe with this book. For all the time Stephenson spends building up the big climax at the end of the book, he speeds through it in about 10 pages. This from a writer who can spend twenty pages dragging you through a character’s momentary sexual frustrations. He creates a really interesting group of characters with some very complex interactions—across generations, no less!—but when they finally all intersect, he races through telling THAT story.

It irked me the first time I read it, and it irks me still. Maybe it’s just that I’m a girl, and I wanted a little more detail about what the characters were FEELING and EXPERIENCING at those critical moments, there at the apex of this story. And Stephenson doesn’t exactly fall down when writing abotu FEELINGS and EXPERIENCES, he just seems tired of it all by the end. I get the feeling he got to the last chapters and realized he’d gone 10,000 words over his target, so he just tied up all his plot strings and stopped writing.

Ah well. No big deal. I enjoyed getting there, so I’m not too disappointed at the destination. This is a good book, part historical fiction, part techno-thriller. Stephenson doesn’t give you a lot of warning before plunging you into the story, and I like that—I don’t want a writer to coddle me through the backstory, just let me figure it out on my own—and he really does create very interesting characters. It’s worth your time if you’re a history buff (particularly a WWII history buff) and if you are interested in technology.