Emily 's Reviews > Cryptonomicon

This is a good 300-page story wrapped up in 960 pages of word vomit. I only made it to page 250 and I just can't keep going. This book is too tedious and full of unnecessary details - for example, there are about 6 pages dedicated to talking about a guy walking from his hotel to his office - and that's it, the entire purpose of the chapter is to describe his walk. There is no reason to use 6 pages to simply say "Randy walked to his new office and got sweaty along the way". There is also a ridiculous amount of pages on really detailed math discussions - it was just too boring (and I'm good at math, doesn't mean I want to read 10 pages about how an algorithm was developed to break a cipher). I had a similar problem with one of Stephenson's other books Seveneves - it spent way too much time on orbital mechanics and not enough time on the story. I really want to like this author but I can't stand his excessive descriptions and details that don't contribute anything to the plot.