Rating: 
Summary: Good, but may overload your circuits!
Review: Cryptonomicon is a very terse, technical, challenging, mind consuming novel. If the length doesn't frighten you away, the details may. Full of techno-talk, crossing generations, and incredible attention to precision, it was a little tiring at times. There was a lot to keep track of and I felt that perhaps the two generations could have been split into two different novels to fully explore each set of protagonists and give them their own forums. However, Stephenson definitely has something here and it's definitely fascinating and captivating. Be sure to leave plenty of open time in you schedule for this one!
Rating: 
Summary: An Epic
Review: Over the summer, I made this the first book I've read for pleasure in almost a year. It took 2 weeks to get through the massive tome, but I noticed that I was sneaking away to it everytime I got a free minute.
Other reviewers can comment on the historical/technical accuracy; what struck me most were the vivid, cinematic descriptions. If you find the time, and enjoy techno-centric novels, you will enjoy this book.
Rating:
Summary: TOO MUCH INFORMATION
Review: Stephenson's novel sprawls, lurches, speeds, then tails away. There are two or three very tight concise novellas competing for one's attention. And the sum is somewhow less than its glittering parts.
Nabokov, in "Despair", had a passage where the narrator writes, "must be calm, keep my head. No good going on otherwise. Quite calm. Chocolate, as everybody knows...(let the reader imagine here a description of its making)."
I cite this reservation uncomfortably: Stephenson goes to great lengths to establish creditability of intellectual characterization. Many of the asides, in and of themselves, would serve the characters well. But over the course of the novel as a whole, I question how much is characterization per-se, and how much is Stephenson showing his props or simply showing off.
Someday this guy is going to write a gem for all time. This novel isn't it, but it's a remarkable start in the right direction.
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: What I really liked about Cryptonomicon was that it felt well researched and gave a good glimpse (i hope) of encryption during WW2. Also, the intertwined stories are very good and keep you turning the pages. The characters are likeable and you keep wanting to know what will happen to them.
Rating:
Summary: A litmus test for cool....
Review: Neal Stephenson has been a respected sci-fi writer for some time. SNOWCRASH, and his later DIAMOND AGE, were great books, but the sci-fi appellation somehow seemed to cheapen their status and Mr. Stephenson's credibility. It's as if a good sci-fi novelist can't be as good as a good "serious" novelist. CRYPTONOMICON eliminates any doubts as to Mr. Stephenson's abilities. CRYPTONOMICON requires the reader to be intelligent and inquisitive. It's a big book that requires the commitment that all big books require, namely, that you read it to the end. In return it delivers an absolutely engrossing story that spans 50 years, 3 generations, 4 continents and one world war. It has one of the best characters ever, Bobby Shaftoe, and one of the best systems ever devised for dividing up the remains of a deceased parent's estate. It tells its story while also expounding on mathematics, computer science, cryptography, engineering and Marines. In short, it is incredibly witty and smart. Two additional notes: 1. As I read the reviews for this book I noticed something startling. The people who give this book a one-star rating sound like incredly shallow, attention-deficient children. Their biggest complaint is that CRYPTONOMICON is too long. But those who give it a good review sound intelligent. They sound like people I would want to have a chat with. That makes sense. Those who like Neal Stephenson tend to be cool. Those who do not like Neal Stephenson think People Magazine has trenchant articles on current events.
2. If you read a review and it complains about the Cap'n Crunch eating scene (as several do), discount the review's validity. That description comes very close to the beginning of the book and indicates that the reviewer did not read the entire novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Plenty of pain but no gain
Review: The only thing I can find to praise about this book is consistency. It's about as engrossing after page 10 as it is after page 890. (& I kept thinking it had to get better!) This is shear pointless verbosity without a single human-like character or sympathetic plot element. Stephenson can just about make the reader not care about the outcome of WWII.
Rating:
Summary: Worth the time
Review: This is a really long book and I hesitated to start on it since my track record on finishing such is less than stellar. Turns out I was happily turning pages all the way to the end. Like Stephenson's other books it's built around an interesting view of the future, in this case an "off-shore data bank" service that depends on excellent crytography. The book is really two separate but related stories, one set in WWII and one a bit in the future, with the text jumping back and forth between them. Now, if someone had told me that before I started I would have groaned, but Stephenson holds it all together and makes it work beautifully. Good read.
Rating:
Summary: Cryptonomicon is brilliant!
Review: This is my new all time favorite book. I read it a second time and loved it even more! I was chortling with amusement practically every other page-- Stephenson's cynical, incisive editorial adds wonderful flavor. The utilization of Lawrence Waterhouse, a brilliant but nearly idiot-savant-like mathematician, to characterize a story surrounding the role code-breaking played during World War II was inspired, and Stephenson portrays Waterhouse intricately and magnificently. I found myself feeling like I was living behind Waterhouse's eyes while reading-- a wonderful way to keep what is obviously intended to be a particularly brilliant character more down to the level of the book's readers. I loved this character! I wanted more of this character and his interactions with Alan Turing. Some nit-picky complaints: 1) the book was clearly the first of a series, and the end, while appropriate to the storyline, was a little anti-climactic given the superlative job done in the body of this work. 2) the math is far too rudimentary for mathematicians of the calibre of the characters, but I understand why this may have been done, 3) there is a little too much dwell-time on bodily fluids for my taste. Nonetheless, I can't wait for the sequel! Bravo!
Rating: 
Summary: Typical Neal
Review: I enjoyed this book tremendously. As usual, Neal Stephenson has served a delightful mix of technology and speculation that ties in with a slightly off-center cast to make a highly entertaining story. However, it suffers from the problem that much of his work does. The ending is abrupt, although not to the same extent as The Diamond Age. If the finish was executed better, this would be 5 stars.
Rating:
Summary: Novel digresses a lot, but still gripped me
Review: Get this: The Allied Powers in World War II had cracked both the German and Japanese codes and had tons of information about Axis troop movements, but the Allies HAD to use the information judiciously so as to not make it completely obvious that the codes had been broken (as they would then be replaced with even stronger codes). The Allies' efforts to conceal their knowledge of the broken codes is the most interesting part in "Cryptonomicon", a novel which follows four different characters (three during World War II, one in present-day time). The novel continually cuts between the four threads, usually with a little cliffhanger at the end of each chapter before jumping to another storyline. I found this cliffhangerism somewhat irritating, but I guess in a 900-page book you have to manufacture some suspense to keep the pages turning. The plot lines range from somewhat interesting to completely gripping, though, so while I always hated to leave one, I was usually glad to rejoin another. There are a lot of little side stories that the author tells as well; a five-page dissertation on eating cereal and a series of graphs plotting one character's productivity versus the time since his last orgasm are my favorites. I can see why these digressions bugged some readers, as it takes some of the steam out of the plot when the novel takes these interesting but random leaps, but I thought they were entertaining and the narrative is all chopped up and blended anyway with different plot lines. Neal Stephenson is clearly well-versed in information theory, war history, computer network security, the perils of starting a new company in the 1990's, and lots of other esoterica that he displays throughout the book. I enjoyed the holding forth on various topics, but then again I'm a computer scientist who studied information theory. I think readers who aren't fascinated by network security or explanations of code-breaking techniques can safely skim over those bits and get back to the meat of the plot, however. Some bits of the book are a little too cute, for instance many of the characters in the present-day plot thread are descendants of the characters in the World War II threads. Also, the present-day protagonist, a network hacker named Randy, spends the whole book wooing what I would call the discerning hacker's dream woman: a fiercely independent and no-nonsense professional scuba diver. Why this selective and ambitious woman would fall for Randy is not quite clear to me (but maybe that's just self-loathing talking, since I can identify with Randy to some extent). My only other complaint is that the author tries to answer critics of the Internet by setting up a straw man, a fatuous Finnish professor, whose glib criticisms are easily refuted by Randy. The Finnish professor and Randy's ex-girlfriend are examples of overly politically correct academics who deserve to be mocked; I just thought that their characters were such caricatures that it makes Stephenson's attempt at satirizing them seem rather too blunt. On the whole though, I completely enjoyed the book and read it voraciously for a couple weeks. Stephenson comes up with many original and sometimes even absurd concepts in the novel, and I was always interested in reaching the next page to see what he would say next.
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