I have to concur with jonquil. Stephenson is enjoyable when his geek is your geek, and annoying when it isn't. Cryptonomicon sucked me in as soon as he met Turing, which doesn't make me particularly proud, because I was inordinately amused by the fact that a decent chunk of pages went by between Lawrence meeting this fellow he called "Al" and the first time that the name "Turing" appeared. I don't think I would have found it either terribly amusing or terribly enchanting if it hadn't been evident from the start to me that this was indeed Turing.

I haven't yet read any of the rest of his books because I'm afraid that his incessant tangents (which delighted me in Cryptonomicon, where his geek was my geek) would become very tedious indeed if I wasn't already interested in the tangent subject matter. The thought of wading through Cryptonomicon if I were just reading for the plot makes me shudder.