I lie. I stopped reading it a lot. I stopped to stare into space and go "huh" and "wow" and "huh" again. I stopped to try to explain the connections Gleick was making for me to my wife (with varying degrees of success), including an epic bedtime conversation that kept us up for an hour longer than we'd intended.

Gleick is one of the great science writers of all time, and that is, in part, because he is a science biographer. Not a biographer of scientists (although there is much biographical insight to scientists, mathematicians, lexicographers, writers and thinkers in The Information), but a biographer of the idea itself, and the way that it ricochets off disciplines, institutions and people, knocking them into new, higher orbits, setting them on collision courses.

I've been fascinated with information theory since a friend of a friend explained "Shannon limits" to me in the late 1990s. I remember the conversation, mostly because the description was tantalizingly frustrating and incomplete, this being a hallmark of really interesting ideas. This friend of a friend explained that there were theoretical limits to how much information any channel could carry, and that these limits included rigorous definitions for "channel" and "information." I've read up on Claude Shannon rather a lot since (I've got a short story called Shannon's Law in an upcoming Borderlands book, about a hacker named Shannon Klod who tries to violate the barrier between faerie and the human realm by routing a single packet using TCP-over-magic) and every time I do, it's a revelation, because some new facet of information theory reveals itself to me.

But nothing has presented these ideas half so well as The Information, and that's a tribute to Gleick's storytelling mastery, his ability to pick out the threads of history that trace back and forward from the discipline's central thesis. Gleick begins with early lexicographers, the primitive dictionaries, the phrasebooks that translated between the talking drum and western speech. He moves onto Babbage and Lovelace (and presents an account of their invention, rivalries, victories and failings that is as heartbreaking as it is informative), and then into telegraphy.

Telegraphy leads to codes, and codes to compression, and compression to logic, and logic to the first inklings of theories, and now you've got Einstein and Godel and Shannon and Turing meeting, debating, fighting and rubbishing each other in learned journals, arguing furiously with Margaret Mead at interdisciplinary conferences -- a pellmell debate in full swing. On Gleick marches, to the double helix and Dawkins and memes, to a section on randomness that is so transcendently exciting that I couldn't put the book down and read it while walking, so distracted I got lost twice within blocks of my office.

Gleick takes us through Wikipedia and the meaning of information, the debates about it, the helpelessness of information overload, the collisions in namespaces -- even through his beloved chaos math -- until he has spun out his skeins so that they wrap around the world and the universe, information theory at the heart of legal debates over trademark, physics feuds over Hawking radiation, epistemology and cryptography, even fights over Pokemon characters and their disambiguation.

The Information isn't just a natural history of a powerful idea; it embodies and transmits that idea, it is a vector for its memes (as Dawkins has it), and it is a toolkit for disassembling the world. It is a book that vibrates with excitement, and it transmits that excited vibration with very little signal loss. It is a wonder.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson: Looking over my list, my husband asked, “Isn’t that almost fiction?” Good point! But reporting on events through the filter of copious drugging and a sizable helping of paranoia is still technically reporting in my book. Hunter’s world view is one of the backbones of modern counter-cultural thought. Start here, and maybe try his vicious lone wolf  takedown obit of Nixon, too.

Just Kids by Patti Smith: Yet another book about a world long lost to our modern times. Smith tells the story of coming to New York, meeting her lifelong friend Robert Mapplethorpe, and living the happy-but-skint life of artists in the big city. While reading, be sure to consider that today you can get a $50 cheeseburger in Manhattan without looking very hard.

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil : I don’t care how historic or high-minded any artistic movement is, it’s going to be full of sniping and backstabbing and petty jealousies. We’re all human, and that’s just part of the fun. Kudos to McNeil for getting all these stories about hairy nights hanging out in front of CBGBs on paper, before many of the principals were lost.

Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson: If that book cover isn’t enough to convince you to check this out, what is? Robert Anton Wilson (RAW to his fans and followers) was an icon of brain-altering philosophies, and his writing has lost zero of its power over time. The headline here is that Prometheus Rising is about meta-programming your own mind. The subheads are many. You’ll feel altered.

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus : Marcus tackles what should be an impossible task — taking anarchic artistic and social movements throughout roughly a century of history, and tying them together into a narrative thread that leads straight through punk rock and pop culture — and pulls it off. And it’s entertaining to boot.

Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante: Scorsese’s mostly horrendous Gangs of New York dabbled in the nefarious history of lower Manhattan, but Sante goes for the full narrative, from the Civil War straight through the first couple decades of the 1900s. Learn what the crooks, prostitutes, swindlers, junkies, grifters and their various known associates were doing for “fun.”

What might "terminator" seeds, access to medicines, free software, and free culture have to do with one another? Do the global attempts to push back against more intrusive intellectual property laws have a common perspective and theory? This book addresses that question, introducing readers to the emerging politics and ideas of "a2k," and the revolutionary expansion of "intellectual property" that preceded it. The book also is a critical engagement with the ideas and possibilities of A2K, with contributions by some of the leading thinkers in the field (Benkler, Liang, Aigrain, Love, and many others).

Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property

In our never-ceasing quest to shock and enlighten the world at large, Terry Bisson and I are releasing a Creative Commons free ebook edition of Terry's incredible collection of tales, sometimes known as Billy's Book, but now transmogrified into Billy's Picture Book, thanks to some painted illos I created for it.

In the same way Ben was served Valis with a meal during his Dharma captivity in season 4, Sayid was given Carlos Castaneda's 1971 mystical memoir along with a sandwich during his Dharma incarceration in the season 5 outing ''He's Our You.'' His highly literate waiter? Why Young Ben, of course, who claimed to have read the book twice. Obviously, the title should be seen as foreshadowing for season 6's Sideways world storyline. Major themes in Castaneda's work include personal responsibility, transformed consciousness, and waiting patiently for life's purpose to manifest itself -- all central to Jack's season 5 spiritual transformation. Of course, Castaneda also was really big on hallucinogenic drugs, which played a role in Sayid's ''He's Our You'' story. Some people believe hallucinogenic drugs played a pivotal role in the Lost writers' room, too.

Ratio

Ruhlman gives readers the ratios behind many basic recipes, and tells you when you should follow them and when you may need to make adjustments or what variations you might want to try. Most of the ratios are related to baking, but also included are some meat-based ratios, stocks and sauces. Knowing and understanding these ratios will ultimately give you great flexibility in the kitchen.

Rating: 8/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing
• Goodreads

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper

Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China
by Fuchsia Dunlop.
W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.

Fuchsia Dunlop gives us an entertaining account of how she fell in love with Chinese food and cooking, as well as the surrounding culture and history.

Rating: 9/10

Links:

• Amazon.ca
• LibraryThing
• Goodreads

Related:

• Book: Heat