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I'm catching up, this book is only 22 years old (Neuromancer, the last book I reviewed, is paying off a mortgage and busy with toddlers). It's too thicc to write a review in one go, so I'll update this as I move along.

I'm only 16 pages in, my LOL tally is at 3, and he's already mentioned Bach and Gödel. Does that mean I have to finish reading «Gödel, Escher, Bach» now? As yet Escher hasn't come up, though. I'm reading all these books out of the nagging feeling I should have read them because they are books one should have read. «Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance» is another one of those, and it weighs heavy on my nerd conscience to have put it aside, half-read, years ago. Not enough LOLs, too many distractions. The internet has poisoned my bookworm. I'm just lately nursing it back to health, it's hungry, but I have actual motorcycles to maintain.

Turing stars in this book as well, not as the Godfather of AI, but in brilliance, flesh, and penis. Where Gibson slapped me around, Stephenson tickles me with a mischievous grin.

There's a bit about encryption key length, how a 4096-bit key would require the resources of the whole universe to be cracked. Just recently I read a post where the author tried to calculate when a key would be impossible to crack in this universe.

It's actually about password entropy, but still suggests to me that you don't even need a key that long to make it unbreakable. It also suggests I should pick longer keys than the usually suggested defaults.

Almost creepy timing: My favorite motorcycle channel on Youtube is featuring Zen/Bike-wrenching in its latest episode:

A non-representative survey among my friends shows that of all those that own a copy of Z/B, none have finished reading it. There's a loose plan of gamifying «Finish Reading Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance» now. I've asked to postpone it until I finished Cryptonomicon, which, as you may or may not remember, is what this log here is about. Oh yeah, chapter «Forays» seems to contain a hidden lesson on software and intellectual property, hilariously wrapped in childhood trauma. ← Admittedly, that sounds wrong.

Really, five weeks? Book is parked by the bedside. I got sidetracked by a Royal Enfield Bullet Classic and two books about the history of BSA, where the war plays a role also, which is the only touching point with Cryptonomicon.

I'm halfway through this pastiche of Cap'n Crunch eating tips, Perl line noise, war internals, lives, travel journals. Sometimes it seems Stephenson gets intentionally long-winded just to make the point that he can keep even the most incessant detour entertaining. He got me at «Emacs». Nah, he had me when all those different threads and timelines started converging. I'll get through it! I find myself picking up the book at times of day when I wouldn't pick up a book anymore.

I've reached the end. Towards it, I frequently found myself picking up the book the wrong way around since my subconscious could not quite believe that the part with only a fraction of the pages is on the right side now. I reached the immersion stage good stories provide, where I want to know how it ends while not wanting it to end. This is probably the longest story I've ever read. Other books of similar word count usually have titles starting with «The Complete Works of».

It seems like «The Baroque Circle» deals with the same set of characters in a different timeline, which is nice, since it took me a while to keep track of who is who when I started reading. I'm glad to find that I can still read a story this long, after the Web with its attention economy made me forget this pleasure with distraction on top of distraction, jumping from liana to liana towards something that never appeared, instead of getting down on the ground for once, feet in the moss, breathing and just being in the moment.

In my teens, I used to ingest a Stephen King novel in a week or two. In my twenties, the Internet arrived at my home. It became my life, gave me a job, made me find loved ones and start a family. And it made me stop reading books for pleasure. Took me half my life to regain a balance again.

Cryptonomicon [Neal Stephenson]

2021-04-10

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2021-04-16

2021-05-25

2021-07-26

2021-08-22