| by Lowell Thing, Editor
;) For those of our readers in the Northern Hemisphere, it is time to consider what book to take with us to the beach or perhaps mountain cabin. Ordinarily, I like to get as far away as I can from reading about information technology. But then I remember that, viewed in its larger perspective apart from our day-to-day drudgeries, IT is the story of our time and an amazing one, too.
Somehow reading "Where Wizards Stay Up Late," Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon's book about the origins of the Internet, is like reading about a project we once worked on ourselves that, in this case, exploded slowly and incrementally into a cultural transformation that is, like the universe, still expanding.
William Gibson's classic "Neuromancer" might be another candidate for the beach, if you haven't already read it. I read it myself long after it was famous. It is never too late to read a classic, and, poking into a few pages right now, I see that it is still holding up well. It will seem familiar to you because by now you've seen a dozen movies that have been inspired by it.
If you want to revisit a lot of IT in a dynamic, scopefully entertaining way, I recommend Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon," an adventure where data is treasure and everything you never knew about cryptography is made clear at last. "Cryptonomicon" is a book you can get your teeth into; it's definitely for a two-week vacation.
Speaking of cryptography, right now, I'm reading Simon Singh's "The Code Book," and struggling (but it's fun) with his explanation of how Charles Babbage broke the Vigenere cipher. "Cracking a difficult cipher is akin to climbing a sheer cliff face," writes Singh, which reminds me that I also ought to recommend Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air," which has little to do with information technology (yet it does: today men about to die at the top of Mt. Everest can say goodbye from their cell phones and epitaphs can be written on their Web sites).
But in a broader sense, any book is a bit of information technology, don't you agree? And (I see them coming to take me back to my regular job now) before I go, I'll just say that you can't go wrong at the beach with any book by Edward Dahlberg, Loren Eiseley, John McPhee, Edward Hoagland, Iris Murdoch, or Walter Mosley.
We used to have a section of book reviews on whatis. Perhaps we should put them back. Meanwhile, if you have a recommendation, would you post it in our "Talk about IT" forum? If we hear from enough of you, we'll start a separate forum called "Books You Recommend."
And I just remembered a Web site that is listed in "Our latest discovery" page.
It's called "The one-book list." The site is terribly out-of-date, but the reader recommendations on it aren't.
Recommend a book
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