Finally finished Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It took me two months. I read a third of it and I brought it the US, reading some on the plane. I got back, barely making it through half. Now, three weeks later, I'm done.

It's dense, filled with history, and all these meandering technical treatises on phreaking, Fruit Loops and physiological reactions to love. Half the the time, I barely understood what was going on. Towards the very end, in the last 50 pages or so of this 1000-page novel, it all comes together. It seems like a very abrupt way to end it all but it's all good. In fact, I love this book.

It's about a bunch of characters, in different timelines, who get involved in codebreaking, building a data haven in some Asian technology utopia, and looking for tons of gold (more precisely, the fabled Yamashita treasue, so the book scores for painting our country in hilarious light). While they're at it, they wage an intelligence and misinformation war, build the computer, find out about family, and fall in love. How awesome is that? It's like Vonnegut meets Clancy.

Inevitably, it's a book by a geek, about geeks, for geeks. But I suspect that anyone who wants to know more and experience more will enjoy it. After all, as Stephenson would say, we are all geeks now.