I just finished reading Neal Stephenson’s book “Crytonomicon”, which is widely considered a classic piece of fiction. I bought it for precisely that reason, and although I don’t think it was an absolutely fantastic book, it was– in a word– interesting.
It’s probably one of the longest single books I’ve ever read. It masses almost 1,200 pages of rather small type, and when I first picked it up I was daunted by that. (A book that long had better be worth the time to read it!)
Something sort of unusual happened while I was reading it: when I started, I was fairly unimpressed with it. I often told Laralee, “This is supposed to be a classic, but so far it’s pretty confusing / boring / slow”. As I continued to read, the various story lines started to come together, and by page 800 or so I was finally beginning to see the Big Picture of the plot.
Around page 1,000 things were a little more riveting, and by the last page I was satisfied that although it wasn’t spectacular, it had been worthwhile. I suppose in a way it was like the movie “The Sixth Sense”, which Laralee and I repeatedly thought we should stop watching… but we gritted our teeth and got to the end, which made us really glad we’d stuck with it. I suppose sometimes the ending can be worth the arduous journey.
