I read quite a bit every year. For 2026, I have decided to document all of my book readings in this blog post. I have other reading too; primarily, I have a CACM journal subscription and read a fair amount on Hacker News and random research papers as well. However, I will only be documenting my book readings. This is purely for experimental purposes, and to look back on this year - years from now - and reflect on a snapshot of my reading. At present, I have no expectation of continuing this experiment in 2027 and beyond. Hope you find this list fun!
By Simon Singh. This book traces the history of cryptography,
from Mary, Queen of Scots and substitution ciphers, to Charles Babbage
and Vigenère ciphers, to Enigma machines, and the Polish and British
efforts in cracking them during WWII. By far, my favorite discussion was
on the Beale Papers, the Navajo code talkers, and how hieroglyphs were
deciphered using the Rosetta Stone. The section on the Beale Papers is
really well written, to the point that I'm quite tempted to take a stab
at it. Maybe I will! I have previously delved a bit into the Enigma
machines, primarily through Professor Brailsford's videos on
Computerphile. I highly encourage you to check out his "Enigma, TypeX and Dad" video, where he narrates a personal story about Ultra intelligence
and Winterbotham (something that is mentioned in the book as well). A
while back, I also found a rather fun article from Babbage's
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
that briefly describes his fascination with ciphers. However, this book
is really on a different level and neatly ties the threads of history
together.
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