Rating: 
Summary: Stephenson in fine form
Review: It's another Stephenson roller coaster ride, filled with entertaining plot loop-de-loops and sideways digressions. Unfortunately, he's still having problems with endings. Like most his novels, the last 5th of it becomes very dreamlike-- things happen, and you're not quite sure why they happen, but it seems to make sense anyway. But the ride itself is more than worth the price of admission.
Rating: 
Summary: With respect to my tastes, this the PERFECT NOVEL.
Review: This book was utterly amazing. I have never read a more perfect novel. If you combine the wit and cynicism of Snow Crash, and the emotive storytelling of The Diamond Age, you'll get the picture.I was sad, while reading this book, to know that it would at some point end. The last 10 pages were difficult to get through, because it meant that I would have to stop reading the book! Again, utterly amazing. Read this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Promised too much and didn't deliver
Review: If there's ever been one problem I've had with Neal Stephenson it's that he can't write an ending. I was actually expecting this one to end with "To Be Continued." The first 700 pages set up a wonderfully complicated plot spanning 60 years of detailed conspiracy and technical development. Then it all winds down and wraps itself up too neatly. The dense pictures of detailed moments in character's lives suddenly go into speed-search as it draws towards a close and characters and subplots are discarded. The plot was too intense to have lurched to an ending the way it did. Worth it for the entertainment, but it's really disappointing that so many of the story's promises aren't kept.
Rating:
Summary: Only a 3.5 Stars
Review: Basically, this is an info-novel. I give it 3.5 stars. I liked this novel. twice I was laughing so hard tears were rolling down my cheeks (the memo including the pig truck episode was hilarious). In general, the story is written in the author's hip, ironic style, we know and love. The reason it does not get four stars, is because of Stephenson's hubris. With this novel he has become un-editable. There were pages and pages of technical minutia in this story, interesting only to uber-geeks. I'm reminded of a textbook exec who said: "Every equation that appears in a textbook (non-mathematics/physical science) costs 10,000 copies in sales." Stephenson cost himself about 100K copies here. These passages added nothing to the story. I ended up rapidly paging though them. You would think an author savvy enough to write a thriller for a targetted audience would not have included material like this. A strong editor could also have saved on production costs by having it removed. Finally, the ending was a bit weak in comparison to the strong beginning and middle. I was disappointed that the least developed characters contributed so much to the novel's conclusion. Still, I recommend this for Stephenson fans.
Rating:
Summary: What does it sound like when an insect falls on a land mine?
Review: It's kind of like ish if David Foster Wallace was a wise old Native American storyteller who grew up in Lynnwood, Washington (ever heard of it?) in the 1970s. Even, it's sort of like as though Thomas Pynchon wrote The Fountainhead, with William Gibson and Steven Covey collaborating on the 20th century stuff to make a cyber-spy novel about modern business success, ethics, funny things people do, and the decoding of messages. Cryptonoicon is a big book about two generations of karmic, "it's a small world" nuclear families. The kind of families full of hard-striving, big-big-big characters. They are basically divided into two piles: streetwise jocks and smarter than peepee information transfer engineers. The girls are different though. It's a funny book which entertains, snowballs in fractal dimensions while building focus, and also gave me lots to think and stare off into space about. All through this book Stephenson draws subtle resolutions of opposites (and conflicts of complements): fathers and sons coming to discover and appreciate one another, men and women growing their understanding of each other; coded chaos becoming luminous, in an everyday way, through the actions taken by the characters. The prose is fast and bright, and in my opinion this book basically hits the ground running and builds steam from there. At its heart, this book is about extracting information from chaos. From the start, I found myself enjoying and liking the characters. It's a fast read if you do as Nils Bohr did and hum through the equations. This is a clear, well written piece of art which is great in scope and unified in detail. Despite its paranoia, it is warmly human. Just like you and me. The many typograxial errors mentioned in a previous review _are_ in fact a code. I just haven't figured it out yet. The paper is crappy, and to cover that up it's got the trendy "deckled quarto" edge or whatever, I bet it will be yellow and falling apart in 25 years. But then, maybe I will be too.
Rating:
Summary: The book that enlightens us all in the art of cryptology.
Review: This book keeps you on your toes by alternating chapters from Shaftoe to Randy Watherhouse to Lawrence Watherhouse. The detail of the book is immense. The best part of the book for me was when Randy was in John Cantrell's room with the "guy that got blown up" and their set-up they used to find the signal of Tom's computer and displays his screen.
Rating:
Summary: Soon to be an NBC miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain
Review: Ignore the comparisons to Pynchon and David Foster Wallace; what "Cryptonomicon" really is, is a next-generation James Clavell novel -- "Shogun," (or, more aptly, "Noble House") with Internet access. As other reviewers have noted, this is something of a departure for Stephenson, and readers expecting "Snow Crash II" or "Diamond Age II" are likely to be disappointed. But it's their loss -- this is a fun, engrossing yarn, and I can't wait to see where he takes it in the next installment.
Rating: 
Summary: Colossally over-written, sporadically brilliant
Review: This will probably win all the major sf awards next year but only because of SNOW CRASH and THE DIAMOND AGE. This book needed an editor BADLY. It's hugely over-written; so much so that characters and plot threads disappear; some drop out altogether. However, it seems that in our culture Bigger is Better and this book has everything in it including the kitchen sink. And one final remark: this is NOT science fiction: it's a mainstream book written like a science fiction novel but it lacks inventiveness, pizzazz, and a considerable amount of joy. I would also add: modesty. Read something else ...
Rating:
Summary: A sprawling powerhouse of a book - a 'must-read'...
Review: Stephenson is once again showing his chops. The comparisons to Dickens (even absent the cutesy intentional anachronistic neo-Victorian touches of The Diamond Age) are becoming almost cliche but ring true. Considering the challenges of a 900+ page book (cf. Infinite Jest, the Otherland series), the fact it takes place in two intertwined time-lines, throw in the present tense, multiple POVs, use of historically real characters (Turing, Reagan...), scientifically valid yet readable expositions of cryptography, van Eck phreaking, and the Riemannian zeta function -- you got to give the guy credit for hanging it all together pretty darn well. I usually rush through books in a single sitting, but this one I'm savoring as I go (so I'm really only reviewing the first 400 pages - a normal book!) It's got a lot to chew on and is *amazingly* stimulating.
Rating: 
Summary: It's an OK read.
Review: As a person who considers Snow Crash and TDE two of her all time favorite novels, you can imagine how much I was looking forward to reading C. What a dissapointment! I actually liked the small, self-contained digressions (cereal, etc) within the book more than the whole. The arch antagonist (can't even remember his name) was like an afterthought, can't even be compared to Raven. The characters' preoccupation with sex was funny for a while, then got tedious. The math and CS side of it was interesting (Van Eck phreaking!) but I'd say don't waste your time & money with the hardcover, get a condensed paperback.
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