Cryptonomicon

The elapsed time to originally read its nine hundred pages was nearly three months, but Cryptonomicon was worth every word, and every minute. Neal Stephenson has written two parallel stories of nerds, one in the present day, and one in World War II, and both heroes are wonderful. The story operates in interlocking, intertwined layers as Stephenson stories do. There are simply too many good bits in this to recount them all, from Lawrence Waterhouse spending time at Princeton with some chap named Turing, to Randall Waterhouse bunged up in a jail in Manila; from Robert Shaftoe, haiku-spouting Marine raider, to scuba-diving America (Amy) Shaftoe; from a mysterious excommunicated priest named Enoch, to a dangerous-looking Chinese guy named Wing. I devoured the last two-hundred-odd pages in a binge, punctuated by my stopping, wandering around for fifteen minutes at a stretch and saying "wow!" Very nice. Deserving of its Hugo nomination. If you have not read it, do so now.  It's head-and-shoulders above some of Stephenson's later books.

Making History

A couple of years ago, old friend Stephen Walli and I were discussing Stephen Fry over coffee one morning. He asked if I'd read Making History, which I hadn't, so he delved under his desk and tossed me a copy. It's wonderful. Given that I'm fond of alternate history, this is a great book. It asks the question, What if you could invent a time travel technique that made Adolf Hitler never happen, but what you got instead was worse? It's told in two sequential tracks, matching the two timelines.  There are great characters, lovely dialog.  It's fascinating stuff, with a little less of Fry's usual wit --- see The Liar for that --- but it's still got all of his wonderful insight.