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The really scary fact about Fahrenheit 451 is that it is more true page-for-page today than when Ray Bradbury typed it all out sitting in the UCLA library basement in 1953. How ironic that this is a book about burning of books which I read while I was burning with a fever! The novel follows a fireman named Guy Montag living in a dystopian country which is at war, where people just wanna be happy at any cost, watch live TV all day, listen to something-like-radio and books are nowhere. Since all homes were fireproofed a long time ago, the real job of firemen like Montag is to burn books. Books are seen as stokers of discussion, rebellion and dissent and hence the anti-intellectual public have banned them. Anyone who is found to possess books is jailed and their books soaked in kerosene and torched by the firemen. The only media that survives isn't much different from today's reality TV, tabloid papers and 24 hour music FM.

Montag sees crazy people everyday who are ready to die for their books and just doesn't understand why they do that. Secretly, he has been storing away a book or two at these book burnings. He runs into a new neighbour Clarisse who seems to never tire of enjoying the outside world and asking Why? about everything. One day she too disappears (the system having dealt with this rebel) and Montag starts to read the books he's been hiding. He is blown away by what he reads and confronts his boss Captain Beatty to talk about it. Montag discovers that Beatty is actually well read and can parry all his queries with this knowledge. Having no escape from this knowledge hating world, Montag is forced to ally with an English professor, kill Beatty and join a band of outcasts who have turned themselves into walking books, having stored it all to memory.

I don't really remember why I had added this book to my to-read list. I'm guessing Fahrenheit 9/11 had something to do with it. The name of the book is inspired by the temperature at which book paper catches fire: 451°F. Ray Bradbury is good, the simple words ache with poetry but kill with their potency. The author mentions that the inspiration for the book came from the McCarthyism, self-censorship, Nazi book burnings and a future of nuclear war in the 1940-50s. There is not a single thing about the book that in 2007 seems out of place. That is whats really scary about it. At just 172 pages it's a short quick read. If you can't find time for the book, at least do read the author's excellent preface (titled Burning Bright) written for the 1993 edition.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account Of The Mt. Everest Disaster written by mountaineer and author Jon Krakauer recounts the ill-fated expeditions that conquered Mount Everest on May 10, 1996. In a span of 72 hours, 12 lives from 4 different expeditions were lost in a storm at the peak. Jon was in one of those guided expeditions led by Rob Hall under his venture Adventure Consultants. Also, on the mountain at the same time was Scott Fischer guiding for his agency Mountain Madness (a competitor for Adventure Consultants) and a South Korean expedition. These teams were climbing from the Southeast Ridge, the easier and more popular climbing route which is on the Nepal side of Everest. At the same time an Indo-Tibetan Border Force expedition was trying to summit from the harder Northeast Ridge which is on the side of China. A spate of mistakes, inexperience, overconfidence and hypoxia induced decisions were accumulating on the climbers during their ascent to the peak. The teams successfully reached the summit and were descending when a storm blew in and it tipped the glass.

The book is fast paced, detailed and chilling to read. Mainly focussing on Rob Hall's and Fischer's teams, we follow them as they acclimatize and head to Everest through the base camp and the following higher altitude camps. Mount Everest towers at 29,000+ feet (8,800+ m) above sea level, an inhuman height, even in 1996 with all modern advances. Helicopters can't fly here (not enough lift). The air is so thin, even experienced high altitude climbers need supplemental oxygen to prevent hypoxia. Winds are cold enough to cause limb-losing-frostbite. In the May of 1996, some of the best and experienced mountaineers on the planet were on Everest and yet the mountain consumed them all. Rob Hall had conquered Mt. Everest 3 times before this. Fischer had conquered K2 (a peak considered tougher to conquer than even Everest). On his team was the insanely exceptional climber Boukreev, who had climbed 8000+ m peaks 7 times, all without using supplemental oxygen! This account is full of tales of heroism, of errors (mostly induced by hypoxia) which ended up taking lives and those of exceptional rescue and survival against all odds. In addition, Jon also provides information about the history of Everest, the various unsuccessful attempts to conquer the peak and the brave mountaineers who tried. The book is a very interesting, visceral, goosebumpy read, which left me very disturbed and with a higher respect for Mount Everest, nature and the human spirit which is ready to conquer it. A highly recommended read.

Cryptonomicon is not a science-fiction novel. It has 2 parallel storylines divided in time -- one happens in World War II and the other is present day. Due to the detail it dives into while describing WWII, it's a historical/techno-thriller. The book is too huge and the plot is too long and complicated to faithfully describe here. The WWII storyline revolves around 3 mathematicians, Turing (yes, the real Alan Turing!), Waterhouse (an American) and Rudy (a German). When Pearl Harbour happens, Waterhouse is pulled into London's Bletchley Park to help the Allied powers break the cryptographic Enigma (and other) codes of the Axis powers. While doing this, Waterhouse and Turing help build some of the earliest computing devices in human history. A large part of the story takes place in Asia, where Shaftoe (an American soldier) is fighting the Japanese. This takes him from China to Philippines. In the parallel current-day storyline (which is told in alternating chapters), the descendants of the above WWII characters are part of a Silicon Valley startup named Epiphyte that specializes in cryptography. They're setting up secure data havens in Philippines and Kinakuta (a fictional name, but it's nothing but Brunei) to act as new Internet backbones and also for Internet banking. These hackers soon run into some WWII artefacts which as they slowly decrypt leads them them to a treasure of unimaginable proportions hoarded by the Japanese towards the end of WWII. It will lead them to discover some startling revelations about their grandparents and their roles in WWII.

With one book, I'm a convert. At 918 pages and 108 chapters, it's long, but ah so delicious! Cryptonomicon is satisfying at all levels, what's not to like! The WWII storyline starts from Pearl Harbour and goes on upto the defeat of the Japanese, thus ending the war. My WWII knowledge jumped by several magnitudes due to the detailed descriptions of the German and Japanese cryptosystems, their war strategies and how they failed. Especially enlightening was the tons of information about the Japanese-American conflict that happened in Asia. The other current-day storyline can't compare to this, but is still engaging enough to be a page turner. This is a real techno-thriller since Stephenson doesn't hold back from smattering his pages with formulas, graphs and details of cryptosystems when they're needed. Linux, UNIX, Windows NT, actual Perl scripts, Turing machines and the wickedly cool Van Eck phreaking all play a part! Also, Bruce Schneier contributed a new encryption algorithm named Solitaire for this book, which can be used to encrypt messages using a deck of playing cards. This is used as a major plot device in the book and Schneier describes the system in the Appendix at the end of the book. Cryptonomicon is badass, I look forward to reading more Stephenson and cyberpunk now!