I never heard of him until a month or so ago. If his other books are half as good as Cryptonomicon then I'm eager to read more. Any recommendations?
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.