Cryptonomicon, The Caves of Steel, and War Dogs

Just a quick update on books I've read lately.

I'd already posted an excerpt from Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon here. I do like Stephenson's work and intend to read more of it. Seveneves is one of my favorite books ever. This one in, in many respects, is great too. But it's missing an ending! Same problem as The Diamond Age only worse. The novel doesn't even pretend to have a proper ending. It just stops going. I still enjoyed it, but that's a pretty serious flaw.

I read The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov while I was stuck on Vashon Island for work and realized that I'd left Cryptonomicon at home. I immediately recognized that it was one of Asimov's robot novels and that it must have taken place sometime before The Naked Sun. Classic Asimov and a real pleasure to read. I do remember The Naked Sun as being a bit better than this one, but it's still quite good.

Most recently, I read War Dogs by Greg Bear. I'm finding that Greg Bear's work is inconsistent, sort of hit-or-miss. This one would be a partial hit. I enjoyed it, but it seemed that Bear was setting up a whole world and then, rather than fleshing it out or really developing the characters, concluding everything by setting up a vague, unsolved mystery that the reader isn't really compelled to care about. I'm still interested enough to look for the sequel at some point, but compared to Eon and such, War Dogs just isn't impressive.