What I’m Reading:

> I just finished Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, a 900+ page shaggy dog of a novel with a complicated plot involving both cryptography in World War II and high-tech in the 1990s, with adventures everywhere from the Phillipines to England, Sweden, and Australia, a diverse and quirky cast of characters, and many fascinating tangents. At times it was frustrating because it had so many tentacles it was all over the place, but Stephenson is a born storyteller who somehow pulled it all together in the end.

> I’ve started Bernard Cornwall’s Stonehenge, a saga about life during the Bronze Age on the British Isles. Too soon for any opinion except it’s interesting enough to keep reading.

What I’m Listening To:

> Beatles For Sale, which was one of the original British albums which, like all the early Beatles albums, was subdivided by their American publisher into parts of several different albums, in this case Beatles 65 and Beatles 6. The original formats are better, and listening to the Beatles 40 years later only emphasizes how great they actually were.

> Chris deBurgh’s Into the Light and Flying Colours. He is my choice for one of the two most underrated rock artists of the modern era–the other being The Strawbs–who walks the line between singer-songwriter and progressive music better than anybody.