Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government, Saving Privacy in the Digital Age, by Steven Levy

This book is part corporate history and part biography, describing how a group of mathematicians created the cryptography that allows us to safely buy books from Amazon.com and porn from, um, never mind. Thirty years ago nobody had ever heard of the NSA, the government agency responsible for decoding foreign communications, and they liked it that way. They quietly classified as much cryptological research as possible and kept the science in a backwater of mathematics. The growing distrust of the government in the late sixties coupled with the ascendancy of computers caused this to change, although not without a fight. This is the story of that fight.

I’m familiar with the Diffie-Hellman and RSA algorithms and remember the fiasco surrounding the Clipper chip, but didn’t know much of the background of these stories. Levy details the both discoveries of the public key infrastructure and the innovators themselves as well as the eventual showdowns with the government. While clearly slanted against the NSA (whom led the battle against public cryptography) Levy does a fairly good job of showing all sides of the problem. For instance, he discusses the national security ramifications of not being able to intercept covert messages and some of the huge cases that were broken due to our code-breaking ability. He also talks about the weaknesses of the algorithms we use today and describes some of the more successful attempts at breaking them. The epilogue was the most surprising to me; apparently a couple of spooks in Britain discovered PGP before we did, but kept it classified until just recently. I found this a very interesting read and recommend it to anyone wanting to understand more about the history of encryption on the Internet.

First Sentence:

Mary Fischer loathed Whitfield Diffie on sight.

Knife of Dreams, by Robert Jordan

I first picked up The Wheel of Time about three years ago (just before starting this blog) and devoured the first ten books in about a month. According to Wikipedia, this is about 3 million words! I found the characters entertaining and the plot intriguing and simply couldn’t put them down. Most series fiction like this are release at a rate of about one a year, so I eagerly awaited the next installment. Unfortunately, apparently the author was very sick and I had to wait much longer. When Knife of Dreams was released in paperback I bought it immediately, but had a very difficult time reading it. I started it two or three times over the past year, but because there had been such a long delay since I’d read the previous ones I found the number of characters and plot lines daunting. A few months ago I heard that Jordan had died and decided I finally needed to finish this.

Several of the story arcs were great: Mat and Tuon’s relationship ballet, Perrin’s rescue of Faile, and the Aes Sedai civil war all progressed nicely and were fun to read. However, Elayne’s war for the crown of Andor felt a bit forced, and the sections dealing with Rand could have been completely omitted and the book wouldn’t have suffered a bit. I understand that the overarching theme in these stories is that “what was is what will be” but the repetition of events seemed overdone. Regardless, I still enjoyed this trip back to the Westlands. The saga is clearly drawing to a close, and Jordan dictated the ending to his family before he passed so the final book will be published. With the amount of unfinished threads in this epic I expect this next book to be a monster, but I’m looking forward to it!

First Sentence:

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend.

Permission Marketing, by Seth Godin

The basic premise of this book is that as Americans become increasingly inured to advertising, companies are going to be forced to changed their marketing tactics to get our attention. Godin calls the techniques that are commonly used today (telemarketing, commercials, ...) Interruption Marketing and holds that it is ineffective. Permission Marketing is the answer: offering incentives to get customers to voluntarily accept advertising. Not being a huge fan of advertising myself, I found the idea on its face to be nonintuitive. Godin does a good job of explaining the benefits, though, and by the end I was persuaded to his view of the world.

As with most business books today, this one is filled with illustrative examples. Most of these are used to great effect, such as Amazon.com tracking customer visits and purchases in order to provide ads and suggestions that are targeted at the individual and thus more likely to result in additional sales. Some of the examples, though, are dated enough to jar the reader out of the flow. It has been a long time since Alta Vista was the most visited search engine on the Internet, and a personal services company named Streamline is touted as being on the verge of huge success due to its marketing strategy although they shut their doors about a year after the book was published. Not hugely distracting, but it did clearly illustrate that the book is nearly a decade old.

First Sentence:

It’s not your fault.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

The more I think about this book the more I liked it. It had a confusing and overcomplicated plot, but the style and imagery was captivating and I found myself in a state of eager anticipation each time I picked it up. Toru Okada is the main character and the story opens with him receiving a crank call. In short order we find he has recently quit his job, his wife leaves him, and his cat has vanished. These losses set Toru on three separate quests: to find his identity, to find his wife, and to find his cat. The crank calls act as both conscience and oracle and quickly escalate, arriving not only via telephone but through his dreams and even in person in a fashion. With a few other odd characters Toru starts down a series of vignettes that are increasingly strange and entirely unpredictable. Along the way we take huge tangents that don’t really advance the plot, but they are so entertaining that my usual complaint about poor editing doesn’t come close to applying. I found the ending a bit abrupt with too many unanswered questions, but oddly satisfying.

Originally written in Japanese, the images painted with words are both vivid and surreal. The translation by Jay Rubin is amazing; with only one exception (a passage where the speaker drops into English to make a point) there was no stilted or off-kilter phrasing indicating that English wasn’t the originating language. Three random quotes I particularly liked:
    “If the Dalai Lama were on his deathbed and the jazz musician Eric Dolphy were to try to explain to him the importance of choosing one’s engine oil in accordance with changes in the sound of the base clarinet, that exchange might have been a touch more worthwhile and effective than my conversations with Noboru Wataya.”
    “"Oh well, never mind," she said, her voice like a little broom sweeping off the dust that had piled up on the slats of a venetian blind.”
    “It was fairly nice music, but the kind that seems to melt into the air the moment it emerges from its source.”
Beautiful.

First Sentence:

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

What Came Before He Shot Her, by Elizabeth George

This book tells the story of the kid that killed Helen Lynley in George's last book. It was an interesting tale, but I found it way too long. We learn not only about why an eleven year old boy would shoot a stranger, but about his brother, sister, mother, aunt, everyone. Almost 600 pages of an overly-intricate plot, telling an extremely bleak and depressing tale. George's editor did her a huge disservice by not tightening this up.

The author's intent was clearly to generate sympathy for the killer, to try and get the reader to see that violent crimes aren't all committed by evil people. I think it was laid on way too thick: murder, rape, theft, abandonment, child abuse, drugs, gangs, and mental handicaps all affected this family. We are supposed to think that society put Joel into a situation where he committed a heinous crime, but the truth of the matter is he knew what he was getting into. I hope George leaves the political posturing to the editorial page of the paper and gets back to writing mysteries.

First Sentence:

Joel Campbell, eleven years old at the time, began his descent towards murder with a bus ride.