I finally finished Cryptonomicon after several weeks of delays. It sparked my interest in reading a bit about Japanese history (a topic I know painfully little about), so I picked up a relatively decent sized comprehensive middle ages to 20th c. book called The Making of Modern Japan just this afternoon at the library. I'm mostly hoping to get a decent reading list put together out of it. I've never found comprehensive histories to be all that interesting, because the best they an ever do is give you a snap shot of something interesting. Have you read House of Leaves? It's in the horror fiction genre. I've not read it yet, but my buddy has been recommending it to me for a couple years now.
Check out The Baroque Cycle if you want something similarly sprawling and complex. Stephenson was inspired to write the series while working on Cryptonomicon and it's clearly meant as a spiritual successor.
flagamuffin was really into Anathem, I think.
With someone, maybe you. It was everything, in my opinion, that a postmodern (post-Dickens/Tolstoy/Austen) novel should be, even though most of them are instead gibberish. No one ever needed a second reading to grasp Pride and Prejudice. No one ever wanted a second reading to grasp Ulysses. I've watched modern literature devolve -- hey this turning into a rant, who is surprised -- into postmodernism and nonsense but Mitchell and Chabon and a handful of others continue to prove it's possible to weave storytelling and modernism into literature. I'll never abandon the classics but these guys have found a sweet spot. Also thought the movie did the best it could with a difficult task.
I very much liked the movie. I thought it was similar enough to relate the feeling of the book while also taking their own direction far enough away that it was easy to view them as two separate works. Casting the same people in each time period was brilliant, and really added a new layer that wasn't present in the book, too.
From wikipedia^^ Huh, TIL.By the mid-20th century, Western scholars generally considered "the Orient" as just East Asia, Southeast Asia, and eastern Central Asia.[2] As recently as the early 20th century, the term "Orient" often continued to be used in ways that included North Africa and even parts of southeastern Europe. Today, the term primarily evokes images of China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and peninsular Southeast Asia.[2]
I picked it by going to my library, researching what Japanese history they had to offer, finding that their grand total amounted to one shelf (at least half of which were books about samurai), and then trying to use the internet to figure out which of the books might suit my interest. Fortunately the internet appears to have a high opinion of MoMJ. Will report back in a few weeks.