Monday, November 14, 2005

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.

3 comments:

Enda Nasution said...

imho, overrated if u are expecting another da vinci code, however a very nice college-student-coming-of-age novel.

Anonymous said...

u finished read the book on nov 2005?? wow, even the book store published it on nov 2006 (indonesian translation).
you must be some book-maniac, can you suggest me other great books that have this and davinci code kind of type?
email me to pelangi_7warna@yahoo.com
awaiting for your preferences, thank you.

Andika Triwidada said...

pelangi_7warna@yahoo.com: You should try reading original version. Translations almost always distorts nuances and multiple-mean words at best.