This Just Read: Cryptonomicon

So, over the winter I re-read Neal Stephenson's epic Baroque Cycle. This planted a seed in my brain to re-read Cryptonomicon, the book that inspired The Baroque Cycle. I've read Cryptonomicon many times--it hits many of my pleasure centers: World War II, cryptography, the invention of the digital computer, submarines, romance, new world economics, geek culture, post-modern paranoia, etc... The list just goes on and on.

I just finished it yesterday and was pleased with the re-read. I noticed something I hadn't before--probably as a result of just having read The Baroque Cycle. Rudy Hacklheber asked a favor of Hermann Goring when they meet. That chapter takes place in Goring's personal rail carriages, surrounded by stolen Nazi art. Rudy's request is left hanging at the end of the chapter--we never find out what it was or whether it was granted.

Later, Rudy flees Germany and hooks up with other characters in the book, ending up on a Nazi submarine around the Philippines. When Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe finds the sunken sub fifty years later, he discovers gold sheets with holes punched out of them.

At the same time, Lawrence Waterhouse--working for American intelligence--is using stacks of punchcards to hold cryptographic data. Presumably the Bristich and Germans are doing the same. It's easy to imaging (as I did on prior readings) that these gold sheets were somehow connected to that.

Reading The Baroque Cycle, however, we know that Daniel Waterhouse (predecessor of Lawrence and Randy Waterhouse) was compiling a Universal Language with Leibnitz for Peter the Great. He was, in fact, cataloging this language on gold sheets with holes punched out of them. Some or all of this work must have been held by Leibnitz, eventually ending up in Rudy's hands (for what purpose we cannot know).

Anyhoo, I've missed out on posting about books I've been reading this spring--there have been a few. I'll try to do a catch-up post. At the same time, I'm kicking off my Summer Reading List with Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. I hoe yo have my entire reading list up this week.

Good reading!