The Information

Started this on nights, which, first mistake. It is not before-bed reading, I found that out around 3am on a slow one, I got maybe two pages into the African drum language chapter before I had to go back and reread the same paragraph three times. Not because it’s bad. Because it’s dense in a way that punishes you for stopping and starting, and stopping and starting is my whole life on shift.

Once I got some daylight hours to actually sit with it, it clicked. The talking drums section is the one everybody talks about and it deserves it, tonal redundancy built into a drumbeat so a message survives even garbled, that’s a design problem I recognize, we build the same redundancy into how we hand off patients at shift change. Also caught the bit reviewers keep circling back to, “it from bit,” the idea that the universe itself might just be information doing its thing. Sat with that one a while, longer than I meant to.

The last stretch, the quantum and number theory chapters, is where it loses altitude. A handful of people mention the epilogue lands soft after four hundred pages that never asked permission to be understood, and I felt that too, like Gleick ran out of runway right when he should’ve stuck the landing. Shannon carries the whole book though, and the bit about wartime telegraph shorthand basically inventing “OMG” a century early got me laughing at the nurses’ station, showed it to a coworker, she didn’t care, I did.

Four stars. Long, uneven at the edges, worth every six-minute chunk I gave it between call bells.