Dive Into Cryptonomicon

I've been looking at local bookstores for a copy of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Last Saturday, I went to Marquee Mall with the wife and kids to meet up with old friends. We were there for a few hours and my baby girl was getting restless, enough so that I had to take outside to calm her down a bit. I wasn't aware that Fully Booked was 2 storefronts away from the coffee shop that we went to. I decided to take the little one with me and go look at what they had on their shelves.

The Fully Booked store at Marquee was definitely bigger than the one in SM Clark. And you know what that means. More shelves mean better variety. I asked one of the staff in passing if they had any Neal Stephenson books in stock. He excused himself, saying he would check their inventory. I walked around, baby in tow, around the shelves. My baby girl was touching the spines of books, face me and say "book" with a smile. That made my day. My baby girl, she liked being around books. And I, like a boy excited, browsed the shelves breathing in the atmosphere, wanting to grab and take home every little (and big) book that caught my eye.

It's been a ritual of sorts for me since high school, when I first discovered books weren't just for reading, as in as a skill, like in school. I discovered books were also for enjoyment. That opened the floodgates. Back then, the only large bookstore that carried novels was National Bookstore. Most of them were in Manila, very few were in the provinces. So it was during my freshman year that I got the chance to go to different National Bookstore branches. Buying textbooks was my flimsy excuse. But behind that was a motive. I had always loved browsing through the shelves. The school libraries I had gone to had always had textbooks and naught more. National Bookstore was way better stocked. And in those days, nobody bothered you if say you picked up a book and leafed through it some. Sampling a chapter or two was okay with the clerks. No one stared at you for guerilla reading back then. So each time I had a chance to get to a National Bookstore, I would wander wide-eyed amongst the shelves and not mind time. I still do that, actually. Every so often, I'd go into a bookstore and be lost in the shelves.

These days, I have money to spend, though most of the time I have to spend it on something more important. Once in a while I would indulge in a book or two. The clerk at Fully Booked returned with a paperback copy of Cryptonomicon. I was so glad that I unwittingly smiled and told him that I've been looking for a copy for a long time and all the bookstores I've been to didn't have it. He guided me to the section where he got it from and I found there was second much smaller copy. It had a font size that I preferred and it cost about half as much. I choose the 2nd copy of Cryptonomicon and took it home.

I haven't really had time to read it yet. I've gone through the 1st chapter and some of the 2nd. Hopefully by this weekend I can free up some time to do so. Wish me luck.