Catalysts, Clusters, and Cryptonomicon

How one (or two, or ten) books sometimes helps another

I've often wondered why some books that seem appealing, turn out to be difficult to get through. These are books that I should love, and yet, try as I might, I can't seem to finish them. For a reader, this is frustrating. For me, it is really frustrating because through experience, I've built up a good sense of what I think I'll enjoy, and when that sense fails, I feel like I'm back at square one. These books, I've decided, lack catalysts.

Recall from general chemistry classes¹ that a catalyst is a substance that increase the rate of a chemical reaction, and yet, the catalyst itself does not undergo any permanent chemical change. For me, certain books can act as catalysts for other. Let's consider Neal Stephenson's cult classic novel, Cryptonomicon.

I first learned about Cryptonomicon in 2002 from a friend who also happened to be one of the smartest people I have ever met. We worked together for a few years writing code, and he was a John von Neumann to my Alfred E. Neuman. We were driving somewhere together and he asked me if I'd ever heard of Cryptonomicon². I had not. He described the book as a kind of nerd's paradise. It had everything: cryptography, information theory, coding (there was even a perl script somewhere in the book!), spies, intrigue. I'd love it, he was sure.

I picked up the book, the very next day, and love it I did, at least at first sight. I have a thing for long books, and this one topped out at something like 1,170 pages. I started reading, and was hooked. But soon, I faltered. Something was wrong. The book was too smart for me. I felt there were important things I was missing. Eventually I gave up.

Over the two decades that followed, I made furtive attempts at the book now and then, always unsuccessfully. Ah, well, there are millions of other books to read and I did my best to make a dent.

Now, when I read, books tend to cluster. That is, I'll read a book on some subject (or in some genre) that appeals to me, and I will seek out similar books. This can go on for two or three books, or ten or twelve. One such cluster began when I read The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick. The book introduced me to the idea that information theory was really just another expression of the second law of thermodynamics. That book led to A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmi Soni. That book led to Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe³ by George Dyson, which led to Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. I found the subjects in these books, some of which was fairly mathematical (or even metamathematical) endlessly fascinating. Eventually, this particular cluster faded out, but other, similar clusters arose.

In another cluster, Hackers by Steven Levy led to The Innovators by Walter Isaacson. That led to Unix: A History and a Memoir⁴ by Brian Kernighan, which took me to Where the Wizards Stay up Late by Katie Hafner and The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, and another great one, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by Waldrop M. Mitchell.

Recently, I'd found myself in yet another cluster. Burn Book by Kara Swisher reminded me how much I enjoyed reading about the birth of tech in the Internet age, a period of time contemporaneous with my career in software development⁵. So I went back and re-read Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. A few books later and I was re-reading Isaacson's biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I started reading a book on the history of science by John Gribbon called The Scientists and that led me to Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel.

Sobel's book had sat on a shelf in my office for a quarter century before I read it. It was not too far away (shelfwise) from the Neal Stephenson books in my collection, and when I placed the book back on the shelf, I saw the three volumes of Stephenson's Baroque Cycle looming before my eyes. Having just read about Galileo in one book, and about Newton, Hooke, and Boyle in another, I thought maybe it was time for me to tackle this series by Stephenson.

And then the copy of Cryptonomicon I'd bought 22 years ago caught my eye. I knew that the some of the characters in the Baroque Cycle are ancestors of the characters in Cryptonomicon. The completest in me felt that if I was going to tackle the Baroque Cycle, I had to give Cryptonomicon one more try first.

And guess what?

I'm about 400 pages into the book as I write this and enjoying it more than ever. I'm seeing the book in an entirely new light. The elements I found "too smart" for me in past attempts are all neatly falling into place thanks to the catalysts I'd encountered in the intervening years. Having a more solid background in information theory made the set pieces on cryptography much more enjoyable. Having read a biography of Alan Turing made the scenes where Turing appears in the book hilariously funny⁶. Having read Brian Kernighan's memoir of the development of Unix has provided added context. Each of those books acted as a catalyst to my enjoyment and understanding of Cryptonomicon this time around.

And like a true catalyst, the source remains unchanged, unaffected by the reaction it helped facilitate that is making my reading of Cryptonomicon so much more enjoyable this time around. I've started to wonder: what other books have I had difficulty with over the years⁷? And what might the catalyst be to unlocking those books as well?

1. Or, take my word for it if you never took general chemistry.

2. This is a ridiculously difficult word to type correctly on the first try so from here on out, I am copying and pasting.

3. In this book, Dyson uses as one of his sources, Willis Ware, someone I knew, and who, early in my career, complimented me on a talk I gave on Netscape Navigator.

4. How much of a nerd am I? I’d long for a good book on the history of Unix development for years. I was overjoyed when I learned of this book and I was not disappointed.

5. I started at my company, 3 months out of college in the fall of 1994, just as the Internet was beginning to take off. And yes, that means this fall, I’ll have been with the company for 30 years.

6. One scene involves a hilarious pun involving an umlaut.

7. Consilience by Edward O. Wilson, and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes for just two examples of difficult books I’ve read. For me, at least.