The one hundred and sixteenth book: #1236 Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

My career is built around computers and especially recently, I've been focusing a fair bit more on matters of security. Having this novel cover a lot of cryptographic topics tied in well with that and made it more interesting to follow - both the development of the simpler systems in WWII, one of the two time periods in which it's set, and that of the late nineties, which is closer to what I do now... and in other ways outdated. I mean, these days social engineering is far more of a vector of attack than purely cryptography, and with advances your key length needs to be a lot bigger, but it was interesting to read about Van Eck phreaking (which wasn't as practical in the situations the protagonist feared) even if it might not be your first approach in the modern day. Even seeing very early references to cryptocurrency is interesting.

With that said, I do feel like some of the staples of the author got a bit annoying. I get the use of some fictional countries to tell your story, but the fetishization of the author's preferred Qwghlm got distracting any time it went from a quick reference to a slightly too irrelevant bit of exposition that just got annoying quickly. Past that, though, it moved quickly and was a lot of fun taken together.