The Rule of Four

The Rule of Four
by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason
borrowed from Budi Rahardjo's personal collection

I love this book. It is about encryption, steganography, and friendship of four Princeton undergrad students. It is about process of solving a 500 years mistery. It is about how deep someone in history or language departement might have to learn about mathematics, anatomy, art, and above all: patience and persistence.

Interesting plots, interleaved tightly between current and past, which require non-stop reading if your memory is weak.

This book, like several others which talks about some -- vital -- historical backgrounds, left me "ngaplo kaya kethek ketulup" sometimes, because my lack of understanding of those events, places, terms, and names mentioned. Reinassance, Boticelli, Michaelangelo, Savonarola, Ibnu al-nafis, just to name a few.

It seems that the ending is somewhat dull, maybe because of its chronological style, but of course it still left a big surprise. Maybe the biggest surprise is that they need six years to
finish ...

But of course, this is very subjective. Readers' review on Amazon varied rather extremely, maybe because this book was hyped as something as good as or even better than Dan Brown's.