Very nice. Not really what I expected, based on what I know about his other books. This is the first of his books that I’ve read, but it won’t be the last.

I’m finding this book harder to get into than the previous Dark Tower books.

I’m a little biased, since I co-wrote the book.

Interesting, provacative, streamlined, clear, and, um, enlightening, like all of Alan Watts’ writings.

This fascinating and easy to read book covers lots of diverse disciplines - history, archaeology, math - while it explains cryptography. The coverage of Bletchly Park and Enigma dovetail very nicely with Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon,
providing the history underlying the fiction. My main gripe is that the coverage of PGP and Phil Zimmerman is incomplete: It omits one of the most interesting and important parts of PGP, the web of trust, and how it addresses message integrity, identification, and relationships.

Very nice. It’s billed as a kids book, and I’m going to try it out on my kids pretty soon.

Gets more interesting the further along I get. It’s not a quick read, though.

This is a huge book, and slow, complete with lengthy flashbacks and staggering amounts of detail. I’ve been reading it a section at a time, which means it’s going to take me forever to finish, but I’m enjoying taking my time; there’s a lot to digest.

I really want Stephenson to start writing real history books. I find his style to be very engaging, and if my any of my textbooks were this good, I would have done a lot better in school.

Interesting and informative, even to someone with a degree in religion.

Reading this with my kids.