> I must have been around 17 years old and it was a warm summer holiday in the South of France. Just shortly before I had picked up a book in the library of my small hometown in The Netherlands. It had a nice picture on the cover with an image I had seen before. The book was called ‘Chaos’ and was written by James Gleick. I read and re-read the book more than five times during that holiday and the weeks that followed. Some of the math in the book exceeded my knowledge, but the story resonated in a way that only ‘The Internet’ would in the two decades that followed.
> > James Gleick published several other books, mostly below my radar. But suddenly the book appeared into focus: ‘The Information, a history, a theory, a flood’. I bought it for my Kindle (ebook) and forgot about with good reason as I was reading the (brilliant) ‘Zero history’ by William Gibson at that time, something that wasn’t to be interrupted. When an old friend mailed me a review and I had just finished ‘Zero history’, I started reading immediately.
> > According to my ebook I’ve only finished 16% of The Information, still, I fully recommend this book. We’re living in the ‘information age’ and we don’t even know what information is. James Gleick won’t provide you the ‘final’ answer, but he will enlighten you with a thoughtfully written and extremely well researched book, written in a style that makes this deep subject as exciting as ‘pageturner’ novel.
gijsbos.com 