Alex has a bit of blasphemy here, where he takes the 1999 best-seller Cryptonomicon to task for a number of various shortcomings. This book is among my very favorites, second only to Lord of the Rings when it comes to reading for enjoyment. It is a long-held tradition among geeks that we have to stand up and defend our treasured books / movies / videogames / TV shows / crossover fanfic when someone else makes disparaging comments about them.

When in school, the tough kids fistfight. The Jocks arm wrestle. The losers try to drink each other under the table. But when nerds compete the ritual usually takes the form of long debates on the merits of Kirk vs. Picard. It’s just the way we’re wired.

He is aware at the outset of just how dangerous his words are:

He makes many other pointed remarks against the book. He wraps up with this:

But the truth is, I can’t really argue with any of his complaints. He runs down the list of shortcomings and some of them are indeed quite bad. The eight pages about the unrelated-to-the-rest-of-the-book couple, one of which had a fetish for stockings and the other had a fetish for antiques? Yeah. That passage was the literary equivalent of a long, awkward silence. Why was that in there again?

I have heard other gripes against the book as well, such as the way Bobby Shaftoe’s story keeps cutting back into flashbacks without warning, leaving you wondering if you accidently skipped a page. Or what about the fact that despite being one of the main characters of the book, we have no idea of what Shaftoe looks like until after the halfway point. Or the part where Lawrence Waterhouse goes riding alone in the Pine Barrens, and the book goes to great pains to describe the scene with such generous use of metaphor that it takes two and a half pages before you realize you have no flaming idea what in the hell is going on or what Waterhouse is seeing.

This is not the first time I’ve seen the book scorned, or at least given low marks. In fact, I have yet to introduce anyone to the book and have them like it. I’m slowly coming to the realization that Cryptonomicon is not a book for normal people. Flaws aside, there are wonderful parts to this book. The problem is, you have to really love math, history, and programming to derive enjoyment from them. You have to be odd in just the right way to love the book. Otherwise the thing is a bunch of wanking. For me, realizing this is like realizing that the big brother you’ve always idolized is, among his peers, an incredible dork.

Mark makes a good point as well:

Which I think nails it. If you don’t get a thrill reading about Alan Turing riding his bicycle – which is used as an example to demonstrate the basic concepts behind the Enigma device – this this book is going to feel like an odd movie which some geek pauses every five minutes so he can describe the physics behind the stunt you just saw. Cryptonomicon is math porn. The story is serviceable, but mostly used as a vehicle to take us between the snippets of Perl source code, logic theory, and bar graphs. If XKCD is not your cup of tea, (nycot) then Cryptonomicon is probably nycot².

So it’s perfectly understandable that Alex doesn’t like the book. It just means that, unlike Cryptonomicon, he’s probably sensible and well-adjusted.

(Humorous charts swiped from around various forums. I dunno who made them. Good job, whoever you are.)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.