That’s ostensibly the plot, but like I said, this isn’t really a novel and the story isn’t really a story. Lawrence’s grandson, Randy, ends up interacting with the descendants of many of the other characters from Lawrence’s story, as he and a friend try to set up a data haven off the coast of the Philippines. Stephenson develops this plot in parallel with one set in the present day (which is to say, 1999, which is, gosh, 18 years ago now). Waterhouse serves in the American armed forces during World War II, where he breaks codes (duh) and gets involved in other unlikely shenanigans. Rather, Cryptonomicon follows a fictional friend of Turing’s, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, who is a genius codebreaker. I’d liken it to The Imitation Game, except I also have managed to skip that one somehow-and anyway, Alan Turing and Bletchley Park feature much less prominently here. This book is ostensibly about codes and code-breaking. This past week was probably not the best week to read it-then again, would there have been a best week? I got lots of programming done on my website while avoiding this book, though. I put off reading it for a few weeks, because I knew that it would take a while. I borrowed Cryptonomicon from a friend’s mother, because it’s truly not on that I’m a mathematician by training yet haven’t read the most mathematical Stephenson work. I was thinking it had been several years since I last read a Neal Stephenson novel, but it turns out to be just under a year.
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