Early Cryptonomicon review

February 21, 2008

Shaftoe’s Haikus come
Plentiful in first pages
None after. Blame Morphine?

According to Wiki How, those lines don’t technically qualify, since they aren’t relating an abstract concept, nor it is about imagery or nature. If you haven’t read the book, then you probably won’t get it.

As I mentioned in my “Books I would like to Read” post, I’m working on Cryptonomicon right now. Great book so far! I really love Stepehnson’s writing. There are a bunch of books that I am going to put at the top of the list that I have already read, but want to read again, and Snow Crash, also by Stephenson, is one of them.

The downfall of Cryptonimicon is that it is a lot of words. The book is over 900 pages, and it has to be one of the smallest fonts that I’ve seen in a book. Really, I’m not getting old, the writing is small. I’m about a third of the way through it, but it could be months before I finish.

One thing from the book that puzzled me, and I discussed it a really strange guy I know, is that the Japanese are referred to as Nipponese, and I guess it is accurate, at least for the time frame. Evidently the Japanese referred to their homeland as Nippon. Or at least they did in the World War II Era, I don’t know if that is still true. At the time, anything of Japanese origin was Nipponese.

That also explains the line from the Pink Floyd song “The Postwar Dream”. The song was on the album “The Final Cut”, and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a historical reference. Great Album.

Seems like I’m getting a little random though, so I better stop here. I was re-reading yesterday’s post, and it seemed more like a jumble of random stuff, rather than just some interesting links. I had better stop while I’m still within 3 subjects of the title.