or giving amateur radio enthusiasts a reason to laugh. It'd be awesome if "Elmer" were a real person, but my guess is that NS is either paying tribute to the real Elmer "Bud" Frohardt Jr.
Does anyone know if he was based on a real character? I’ve dabbled in amateur radio, and helpful older hobbyists are often referred to as “Elmers”. I'd imagine it's easier with a paper copy too since the difficulty is associated with the constant rewinding more than anything.Īll that said, I did find the book enjoyable though cumbersome.One delightful very minor character from Cryptonomicon is “Elmer”. Reading those chapters was far easier on my Kindle where I could use the Kindle Dictionary or X-Ray features. Overall I'd say it's a pretty tough audiobook and it can be easy to get lost in all the jargon related to cryptography, military, mathematics, organs, mining, scuba, and East Asian cultures if you're not too familiar. This happened to me a lot with the Goto Dengo chapters, which were also harder to keep track of because of the Japanese nomenclature. I found it easier to read those types of chapters, it was particularly bad when he would start a chapter with an analogy.Īnother annoying trait of the audiobook was that sometimes Stephenson would only refer to a character by their last name or title, but since every chapter is about a different character and the context shifts significantly between chapters, it could take a solid 5 minutes to know if the chapter was about Grandpa Waterhouse, or Grandson Waterhouse, or if it was about this soldier, or about that soldier. Stephenson's writing seems to lend itself to frequent non-sequiters, extended metaphors, and rabbit trails which admittedly left me lost more than a few times (I don't have an issue following these parts when reading physically).Ī few times in the book he'd go off into a two or three page description of something technical or a loosely related analogy, which through audio, could be a ten minute rabbit trail, and I would lose track of which character this chapter was actually about.
Parts of the book were extremely technical and required full attention if I wanted to follow along and I found myself rewinding a bit too often. Listen while driving, walking, doing other things.īut this is also the downside to listening. The books is incredibly long, so I did find some benefits to listening vs reading because I could multi-task.
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