Рецензия на книгу

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  Аноним27 мая 2025 г.

  This book should have a subheading like "The Book Of Tangents" or something. For a book this size, there is surprisingly little plot and little substance, but there are a lot of tangents and random side-stories.

  Are some of the tangents and side-stories fascinating? Yes. Do some of them help build the world of the book or the characters? Yes. But we also get stuff like this: one of the MCs sits and watches a supporting character hack the laptop of some minor character, who we don't meet further in the book, through radio waves or something like that (apparently actually possible and plays a small part further in the book) - which is fine so far, but we then read ten or so pages of what the minor character is typing at that exact moment, which has no relation whatsoever to anyone or anything else in the book. And there is a ton of stuff like that, some of it also quite badly written.

  A lot of it is also absolutely redundant. Somewhere in the second part of the book we get a whole chapter about masturbation and one of the MCs using formulas to describe how he needs to masturbate to be able to think clearly but also doing it with a woman would be better... Does it show us that the character is a possibly neurodivergent nerd expressing everything through formulas, who also mostly views women only as a source of his pleasure? Yes. Have we been shown that over a dozen times previously in the book? Also yes.

  A few other things: there is very little cryptography for a book called Cryptonomicon; the past storyline is way more interesting than the present one (although it gets a bit better by the end); the book is racist, sexist, and practically everything-ist, and not just in the past, war-related parts.

  I did love the parts related to cryptography and all the "we can't let them know we have broken their codes" stuff, and some of the war vingettes are hearbreakingly terrifying. Mixed with parts of the book that are bordering on atrocious, all this made for a somewhat confusing rollercoaster of a reading experience.

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