Reading the Chunksters discussion

I do like crosswords and anagrams and such, but not so much puzzles involving numbers. So I tend to just skate over the code in this book.

Sergeant Shaftoe is my favourite character. I love his "Sir! Yes, sir!"

"Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate trees. 'Shit!' he says.
'What's wrong, Sarge?'
'I just always say that when I wake up,' Shaftoe says."

Here are my notes on the chapters for this week.

Electric Till Corporation – Australia, 1940s. Major Comstock, US Army (have we met him before?) is looking for goods at the docks at Sydney, in crates marked Electric Till Corporation, where he used to work. He finds the crates. We do not get to know what is inside.

Crypt – Kinakuta, 1990s. Randy W. meets Ferdinand Goto. (We’ve met a man called Goto in WW2—a Japanese soldier that Bobby Shaftoe(?) connected with in his sushi bar adventure? Correct me if I’m wrong there.)
Randy’s thoughts on the use of “Nips” and whether it is racist—this is something that has bothered me in this book (why say “Nipponese” instead of “Japanese”, thus making a big deal out of it?)
Anyway, Goto Engineering is working with Epiphyte in the same business operation. Randy (alone) goes to visit the site where Epiphyte and Goto Engineering have begun operations in some massive caves, installing computer storage for their data haven.
The caves had been a bomb shelter and command post for Japanese forces in the war. Randy sees an old chest full of wartime books that he says he has seen before, in his grandmother’s attic (she would presumably have been Lawrence W.’s wife).
An elderly Japanese man arrives and is treated respectfully by the Goto staff (WW2 survivor? Maybe even the Mr. Goto from WW2?).
Randy leaves for the Foote Mansion, Kinakuta’s luxury hotel. He’s reading an account by S.D. McGee of the Japanese surrender of Kinakuta. All of the surrendered Japanese troops were massacred in 1945 by survivors of the native tribes they had used as slaves during the war. So that’s why the memorial garden is there.

Lizard – Southern Italy, 1940s. Bobby Shaftoe is with Detachment 2702. His lizard dream: he was attacking a Japanese position on Guadalcanal and was losing, when the Japanese in the trench were attacked by a massive lizard that ate them.
In Italy their mission seems to be to establish a fake observation post and make it look as though it’s been there for a year. They send some coded messages.
Root tells Shaftoe that the papers planted on the dead butcher were in German, concerning future convoys between Palermo and Tunis.

The Castle – Qwghlm, 1940s. Lawrence W. is alone at the castle on the islands until the rest of Detachment 2702 arrives. He sends a coded message asking for construction wood. The method of coding is explained for us.

Why – Kinakuta, 1990s. Randy opens his email intending to read Epiphyte’s latest business plan sent by Avi. He also sees email from an unknown called Root who asks why they are doing their project. He plans to cut and paste an answer from the business plan, but he has forgotten his password. He goes to meet with John Cantrell of Epiphyte in the hotel bar. Cantrell tells him that other companies are also laying undersea cable to the Crypt (caves). Randy’s antagonistic history with a guy called Andy Loeb, with whom Cantrell and Tom Howard of Epiphyte have also had negative dealings through their cryonics organisation (Eutropians).

Retrograde Maneuver – Sio, New Guinea, 1940s. Retreating Japanese troops bury their code books in a steel chest by a river.

Huffduff – Qwghlm, 1940s. Lawrence W. pretends to scan the sea for submarines, a 24/7 job because he’s still alone. The German navy has made their code more complicated for the past year, so Bletchley cannot break it. (IRL: the naval version of Enigma code was the last to be broken.) He begins an affair with local woman Margaret, and encrypts a message in her presence, which suggests putting a code book on a ship and have it wreck itself off Norway (occupied by Germany 1940-45).

Pages – Australia, 1940s. Aussie troops found the Japanese code books by the river, and have brought them to Brisbane, where they are drying out the pages.

Haha yes. And Margaret is like, "Can I get in your hammock? I've never been in a hammock" *bats eyelashes*

Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate trees. "Shit!" he says.

"What's wrong, Sarge?"

"I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says.


Ha ha! I just got to this part at the end of my lunch break. :D

Lol. Not anymore, Lorna. I guess they are used to it now. Me eating lunch with a fat brick of a book on my lap is what they see every day. The last one I lugged to work was Reamde. And I am usually reading one of Charles Dickens big books too. :)

I just finished this section, read through the above comments, and realized that I quoted the same scene that Rosemary did! Lol. I wonder what the chances were of that happening?

I loved the Margaret chapter. “Execute a Manual Override”. Ha ha.

Lorna asked about puzzles. I love them, and I tend to lean towards the mathematical puzzles (not that I’m any good at them, though!) so I paid attention to the codes when they were described. Pretty interesting.

Lorna, Reamde was a lot of fun. Once it got going it was nonstop action. I flew through that book in a month. I liked Snow Crash too, it’s one of (or is?) Stephenson’s first books. And it’s much shorter.

@linda @rosemary, I highlighted the same shaftoe quote while I was reading. That’s makes three of us. It was a very funny thing to say.

Personally, I like puzzles, but I don’t like using symbols as much. I prefer to use language, which is one of the reasons I like the descriptions in this book. The puzzles are communicated with language.

I think this realization started when I was in a calculus class and we using derivatives to find velocity and accelerations. I had a lot of fun with those kinds of puzzles and it was fascinating to me that so much was being said in such a small equation.

This is what I appreciate most about Stephenson. He is able to take all these puzzles and tell their story. I am much more of a puzzle storyteller than a solver of puzzles if that makes sense.

My favorite chapter from this section was when randy was in the bar with Cantrell. It was such a vivid picture and I like the contrast his character creates. On the one hand, there is shaftoe and Waterhouse who are engaged in the noble pursuit of fighting in world war 2. Then you have randy and avi who are involved in something risky and somewhat selfish, and I can’t quite see the connection yet.

I also really liked this description.

“An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross.”

Brushes made from unicorn mane. So original.