I can’t recall ever having been so sad to see a book end. Especially since, with this volume’s appendices and extensive Arban glossary, it looks like the reader has a while yet before reaching the end and then BOOM suddenly the glossary is staring her right in the face from the facing page. Ah, me!

Like all Stephensons, this will be a book I read over and over again. There is always and ever only one first time, which makes this bittersweet.

It was worth waiting for, though, this book. Most assuredly.

I am deliberately taking my time on this and savoring every minute. A difficult task when it’s bursting with Stephenson’s mind-boggling way with mind-boggling concepts, very amusing characters (even though every book nowadays features basically new versions of Randy and Avi) and delicious laugh-out-loud dialogue like this:

“Our enemy is a spaceship with atomic bombs. We have a protractor.”