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1. WOW!
   I LOVED this book. But, for potential readers, I have a VERY large caveat: Unless you have a love of mathematics and/or cryptanalysis you’re going to miss out on much that made the book, for me, so great. In fact, judging from the one and two star reviews so prevalent here, you more than likely are going to hate it and end up torching it in your back yard in frustration and dancing around the ashes. By way of anecdote, I was talking to one of my neighbours who happens to have a degree in mechanical engineering while we were out walking our dogs about a certain aspect of the book that had me puzzled for a bit, and another neighbour stopped to join us. After listening for a time, she looked at me and asked, in a semi-sarcastic, baffled tone, “Are you reading an Engineering textbook for fun?” When I told her it was a novel, she became even more nonplussed. So, the point here is, you’ve been warned. I happen to be an English Literature major, but I was one of those kids in school who in, say, trigonometry class just looked at a math problem, knew the answer and handed in my tests in five minutes. The words, “SHOW WORK” are scorched into my memory of adolescence. On the other hand, if you’ve liked Stephenson’s other works, or like picaresque literary jaunts in general, you will no doubt like this one as well. You’ll just have to skip the parts I found most fascinating.I can now say, though, that I understand why Stephenson fans took him to task for lack of verisimilitude in Snow Crash and the books which constitute The Baroque Cycle, both of which are a great deal of fun to read, but not terribly conducive to deep thinking. This book is so conducive, for a number of reasons, but the primary one, I should say, is that very few people realise just how WEIRD the branch of mathematics known as Statistics is. The simplest example I can think of is coin tossing: If you enter a (rather primitive) casino, toss a coin once and come up heads, your chance on the second toss of coming up heads again is 25%. It’s not 50%. Furthermore, if you toss the coin and it comes up heads, then put the coin in your pocket and wait three days, three months, three years, however long, and take that same coin out of your pocket on the other side of the globe and flip it, your chances of coming up heads, after all this time, are still 25%, not 50%. I’ve gone out about the Math enough for this review, but the Math herein is very much concerned with probabilities like this one. It makes you start thinking, as the character Waterhouse does at one point, of the entire world as a giant probability wave. I can’t tell you how many hours of sleep I lost tossing and turning with different numbers running through my head.The characters in this book, as Stephenson puts it are “people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy.” This makes for very intriguing, if involved, reading. But the writing can also approach the poetic at times. The sinking of the Arizona at Pearl Harbor is described thusly: “A military lyre of burnished steel that sings a thousand men to their resting places at the bottom of the harbor.”And the book is so terribly funny. The Englishman, Chatan’s, description to Detachment 2702 of the importance of knowing the right way to, er, blow your head off if in danger of being caught by the enemy is priceless, “You would be astonished at how many otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure.”Also, as noted by other reviewers, there are numerous in-jokes, my personal favourite being the Latin motto for the Societas Eruditorum: “Ignoti et quasi occulti.” Which Enoch Root translates for Bob Shaftoe as, “Hidden and unknown-more or less,” which is EXACTLY what it means! Notice the quotation marks surrounding more or less. The word “quasi,” in Latin means “more or less” or “as it were” or “so to speak”.Alright, I’ve gone on long enough, perhaps too long, for an Amazon review. For those few who might be interested, I’ll try to include a simple program I came up with for solving the Turing bicycle problem, which Stephen uses to illustrate how the Enigma machine works in the Comment section once this review is posted.A wonderful book!

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2. Detailed, really really detailed. 🙂
   FYI – Kindle version ends at 87% with the rest of the book being appendix and ebook extras. The LAST thing I wanted after reading this book was 13% more reading about code. :-)Wow, what an intense, laborious, interesting, pedantic, read. Told from multiple points of view, alternating between WWII and present day (late ’90’s) this is a really complex novel about … stuff. Lots and lots of stuff and detail about said stuff. Obviously, it was about breaking code in the war, also, breaking code as a hacker. It was about war and the effects of war, and the creation of the first digital computer, and the proper way to eat Captain Crunch. And some Greek mythology. Money. Cyber-everything. All over the place. It even included some hints at the creation of the NSA, which was interesting. Particularly since it’s very clear to see the need for code-breaking in the war, and what it has “morphed” into.It really was a great story, well-told. I’m glad I slogged through but I would really only recommend this book to people who like to know how things work, to the last detail. The characters were great, and fully developed. I found myself rooting for almost everybody, good guy or bad, and I suppose there’s something to that as well. Just because someone is ostensibly on a side you are not on, doesn’t mean they aren’t on your side.I had a lot of difficulty with the rotating POV’s which is part of what made this slow for me. You’d get into a storyline, and then BAM pulled out of it, and who knew when you’d get back to it. Those types of structures don’t generally bother me, but in this case it sort of always left an easy stopping point. Also, this book needed editing like NOBODY’S business. You don’t have to go step by step decoding an ENTIRE message for me to get the point. And there was one scene (a prison exchange) where it got so didactic they actually spelled out the real definition of a word conversationally. It was so inauthentic.It’s a magnum opus for sure. Worthy of its recognition and probably worthy of 5-stars. But I just couldn’t get past the bog of excessive detail enough to give it the full 5.

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3. Interesting story line. Challenging to complete in one sitting.

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4. Man liebt es oder man hasst es! Ich gehöre zu denen, die begeistert sind. Tolle spannende Geschichte

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5. If we lived in a fair world Neal Stephenson would receive Pulitzer Prize for literature . But of course we don’t live in a fair world ! Very interesting to me that this book is classed by Amazon as social commentary because as I was reading it I was sitting through the final throes of the 2016 election for the presidency of the USA . This book is so much more than social commentary but it’s really beyond description of most of Neals works are. This is a reread for me and I specifically rerouted at this time because of all of the events seem to be centering on us at high-speed . Between Snowden and the NSA, Homeland security , and a federal election in the US, and commemorating DDay just seemed like a good time to take a walk down memory lane. Of course when this book was written we had already entered into a full-blown information age but I think since then we have gone beyond all of that into a truly scary future . One in which during the reading of this book I googled bitcoin just to see what I might learn . What is truly fascinating is that within 12 hours my Twitter account showed an ad for Masters of Science in digital currency . There’s a chapter in this book in which the character Enoch gets along and detailed account of the Greek gods of Ares and Athena . This was so wildly apropos given the Trump versus Clinton election that was one day away that I felt like I was swept into a history of archetype and myth. If you haven’t read this book read it, if you’ve read it before reread it. That is really what this book is about it’s archetype it’s myth it’s storytelling at its very best , and it’s really beyond description . I have read that Neal writes his books and longhand spiral notebooks and then have to have them transcribed by only one person who can actually make sense of them . Given the labyrinthine plots of these books it just is so perfect to imagine them written longhand and decrypted by the only person who can make sense of them ! I readily admit to being a geek fan of Neil Steffensen.

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6. Surprising funny. The multiple timelines were not confusing at all. I didn’t understand half the math, but that was no hindrance to my enjoyment. I loved all the accurate historical and geographical references (aside from the Fremantle thing). Kindle is great for checking details and meanings on the fly. Ascot is a lovely place to live, now air-conditioning is widespread.

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7. Une extraordinaire saga historico / technico / espionnage s’étalant sur plusieurs générations de personnages et quatre continents. Un petit chef d’œuvre dans lequel il fait bon se laisser porter. Le format Kindle est vraiment TRES pratique compte tenu des presque mille pages du bouquin. L’anglais de Neal Stephenson est ici facile à lire (à l’instar de “Zodiac” par exemple, à l’opposé du verbiage de l’épopée “Baroque”).

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