One could rave about the seamless plot, the perfect weaving of multiple timelines, locations, and characters. All of these overflow with color.

But it is the pure writing that entrances me. Cryptonomicon's language is beautiful. You can read the same sentence over and over again and enjoy it each time. How rare is that?

I laughed out loud at several points: my daughter kept on looking at me to figure out what the big deal was. This book is FUNNY. It gave me a lot to think about with regard to our privacy. I bought it one Thursday and didn't put it down until the following Tuesday.

I got this for Christmas and finished it late last night.

As the tale begins, the author initiates two primary storylines, The first is set in WWII spanning both the European and Pacific theatres. The second is modern day and is centered on a California start-up (with requisite ambitious young guys) with primary business interests in the far east. One knows the stories are connected because of similar last names in both. The other connection is encryption - how crytography was central to the war and how it is central to current day business and, in the author's view, central to the future of civilization.

One of the great pluses of the book is how the author made use of these commonalities between WW2 and modern-day to create interest and anticipation. The middle of the book actually made use of these quite well and I was eager to keep reading. There is some terrific writing in middle sections and descriptions of people and places both in Europe and the Far East are very vivid.

The author does write with terrific humour at times and I was reminded in several places about a series of books written about WWI called "The Bandy Papers - the Journals of Bartholomew Bandy" by Donald Jack. Very similar in style as the author captures the points of view - dry wit - of Grandpa (WW2) and grandson (techno geek) Waterhouse.

The presentation of Gen. Douglas McArthur was (from my Canadian perpective) endearingly flag-waving-pipe-chomping-bullet- shedding-American-Super-hero and, of course, totally unbelievable.

Then I hit the final pages where I had hoped to receive a big-payoff to the build-up over the previous thousand pages. Alas, it was not to be and all the tedious verbiage that scarred the entire book turned out to be a sad bell-weather.

One of the "1 star" reviews amongst these reviews suggested that Tolkien was nothing compared to Neal Stephenson as far as filling up pages with words. There are numerous examples of page after page of "who cares" blathering which may tell us that some of the characters are in fact terribly boring individuals but do not deepen the characterizations. One of the good points is that when you hit such a section - and the reader will recognize them - you can simply skip about 5 pages or more and pick up the story without missing anything. The book could have been shortened by about 400 pages, maybe more. I'm guessing there is an encrypted message in the pages somewhere but I couldn't care less.

Some story lines, characters and inferences are left totally unresolved in the end (e.g. what happened to the dentist?). A case of author boredom and a loss of interest as the ending approached? And why the heck did Andrew Loeb make a final appearance! Talk about out-of-place and just bizarre.

I dunno what the author is thinking sometimes but several times he comes across as just a tad too clever. At least 3 times during the book (inluding the opening pages) I didn't have a clue what he was talking about. For example, one such bit of cleverness is his incorporation of the Hindenberg disaster in New Jersey - the narrative is written at that point from the perspective of a main character who stumbles literally out of the woods after seeing a brightness in the sky. It is not central or even obliquely of interest to the story line. The author never mentions Hindenberg by name and it is left to the reader (if you can pass the author's ever-so-clever test of cleverness) to figure it out. It seemed somewhat a condescending (to the reader) writing style.

There is the usual technology-dropping (like dropping names but gadgets instead of people) to presumably up the coolness factor and from my knowledge it is mostly, but not always, believable.

Ultimately, why there is some terrific writing, the overall result is a draft that needs 1 or 2 more rewrites and a worthy ending to really tell a terrific

Got a month of free reading time? And that's free time for ONE book? This isn't a condemnation of Cryptonomicon by any means, just a warning to those who pick it up. Because once you start reading, chances are you won't be able to stop.

Author Neal Stephenson is either an authentic genius or a certified wacko (or both), because Cryptonomicon is so intricate, so layered, and so engrossing, that someone who could write this much material, and contain it in one novel, must have an odd functionality to their brain.

Spanning two generations of families during pre-, intra-, and post-WW II, this epic (and it most certainly deserves that title) shows the reader the early formation of computer language that developed thanks to code-breakers within the U.S. and German intelligence communities. This may sound horribly boring, but it is far from tedious. Author Stephenson knows not to bore readers. He incorporates cryptanalysis into everyday life, often with hysterically funny results (at one point a character relates his masturbatory behavior to helping solve enemy codes; and another time the London street layout helps design a code system that is nearly unbreakable). All of the characters are incredibly human, from the earliest "geeks" (Richard Waterhouse and Avi) to the rough-and-tumble WW II gladiators (U.S. Marine Bobby Shaftoe and General Douglas MacArthur). There are deadly battles with Japanese soldiers, crushing encounters with German U-boats, and even a treasure hunt finale that'll tickle your funny bone. There's romance between a geeky code breaker and the young granddaughter of Bobby Shaftoe. There's government conspiracies, and unlikely alliances between men on opposite sides of the war. There's ...just too much to put into one review! Fortunately, though, Neal Stephenson (author) masterfully ties all of these threads together and culminates it into one of the best conclusions seen in novel length fiction history.

At 1,130 pages long (paperback), the thickness of Cryptonomicon may be a deal-breaker for some readers. Don't let it be. The author's able prose is sustained throughout its ample length and will keep readers coming back to see what awaits the Shaftoes, the Waterhouses, the Roots, and the Dengos.

A prodigious novel from a genre-busting author, Cyptonomicon defies categorization. It is and isn't science fiction. It is and isn't historical fiction. It is and isn't a techno-thriller. It is and isn't many things. But the one thing it most certainly is is a masterpiece.

"Cryptonomicon" is entertaining and gripping at parts, and downright tedious at others. Stephenson makes a very obvious choice to go into far too much detail about the technical details of plot mechanisms to lend his novel extra geek cred--or maybe he thinks his audience actually enjoys that part (and, judging by the success of this book, he might just be right).

But while some passages seem, every once in a while, to capture some element of human emotion, those parts are the exception rather than the rule; in general the characters are caricatures, the technology researched and plausible but, frequently, just slightly wrong (the educated reader might pick up on enough of a giveaway, every so often, to reveal that Stephenson is no expert on the technology he uses in his plots), and the descriptive passages tedious and long winded (a previous reviewer mentioned a scene in which the protagonist eats Captain Crunch cereal--suffice to say that that description drags on, in Hemmingway-esque detail, for pages).

Perhaps I'm being overly suspicious, but all of Stephenson's twists--his unnecessary descriptions of cryptographic algorithms, his in-jokes (punning the name Linux as "Finux," for instance), his long-winded lip service to Dungeons and Dragons--seem designed to ingratiate him with the "geek" crowd that is his intended audience. A reader of this persuasion may find these nods titillating, but he should also question whether this lip service is genuine, or if he is merely being pigeonholed by Stephenson.

This certainly isn't a bad novel. It's generally entertaining, good B-grade bedtime reading. But "the next Dickens," to quote another Amazon reviewer, Neal Stephenson is not.