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1. Should I get the Baroque Cycle? The excerpt I read in the back of my copy of Cryptonomicon (which someone thoughtfully abandoned at the waiting room in the hospital where Malcolm was born) didn't seem especially exciting, but I mostly read him for the "Stephensonian asides," not the plot. You know, the long, terminally crazy digressions about things like furniture fetishes and the ingredients of condiments found in pubs.
2. WTF is up with Enoch Root in Cryptonomicon? I feel embarrassed asking this because it seems such a ghastly oversight that I'm sure it was hinted his death was faked or something, and I just missed it, like a dummy, both times I read this thing. But it drives me crazy that the book says he's killed in the forties, to the point of showing the doctor making his death certificate, only to have him show up alive and kicking in Randy's cell fifty years later. Am I supposed to understand that he didn't actually die in that scene, but they made it look that way so Julieta could inherit as his wife without the hassle of actual marriage or something? But why the hell was Shaftoe mourning, then? Ngggh!
2. WTF is up with Enoch Root in Cryptonomicon? I feel embarrassed asking this because it seems such a ghastly oversight that I'm sure it was hinted his death was faked or something, and I just missed it, like a dummy, both times I read this thing. But it drives me crazy that the book says he's killed in the forties, to the point of showing the doctor making his death certificate, only to have him show up alive and kicking in Randy's cell fifty years later. Am I supposed to understand that he didn't actually die in that scene, but they made it look that way so Julieta could inherit as his wife without the hassle of actual marriage or something? But why the hell was Shaftoe mourning, then? Ngggh!
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