“Cryptonomicon” by Neal Stephenson was written before the Baroque Cycle trilogy and is closely related to it. However, the events in this book occur after the Baroque Cycle. A lot of the action in “Cryptonomicon” takes place in World War II. Then there is a treasure hunt involving gold collected during the war. And it’s also a story about a startup, which tries to setup a currency, that somehow reminds me of Bitcoin (the novel was written before Bitcoin was created). We learn a little about cryptography and code breaking, which is cool, but I found the startup anecdotes even more entertaining. And there are some really nerdy jokes, but I am not going to repeat them here.
The copy of the book that I have is over the thousand pages, but to make the book lighter apparently the publisher decided to compensate by making the fonts smaller. Which is fine, I guess, if you are twelve and don’t wear glasses. Myself, I wasn’t that happy with the smaller fonts. Also there are some diagrams in the book and supporting material for the cryptography pieces. Seems a bit odd. I would have just posted that material on a website and linked to the URL from the book.
Conclusion
Great book, shame about the small fonts.
