vir·tu·o·sic

Looking for a lighter time, I recently read and finished 'Gallahad at Blandings' by P.G. Wodehouse - you know, the British author with a unique sense of humour. Needless to say, it was very funny and there were places where I burst out laughing.

An excerpt from this book is below. This is about a barmaid who has just witnessed somebody stealing something. Wodehouse writes her startled cry, instead of stating it as a fact, in so many words as:

She was, accordingly, deprived of speech. Then, her vocal cords in mid-season form again, she expressed her concern and agitation with a EEEEEEEEEEE!! which probably made itself heard and excited interest in many a distant parish.

Well, this sort of exaggeration is what I find comic about his writings. And, his books are rife in these exaggerations.

If you like this kind of humour, you'll love Wodehouse, or, as Wodehouse would say, "you'll find the taste of humour agreeable to your senses"

Currently, I'm reading the book 'The Code Book' by Simon Singh. Written in a very gripping style, it gives you a very good history of how cryptography evolved and what it might be in the future. It includes ancient ciphers to recent ones and also touches upon Quantum cryptography.

One side-benefit that this book offers is the realization that how knowledge of varying subjects can give solutions to problems that initially seemed unsolvable or very hard. As an example, when describing frequency analysis as a way of cryptanalysis, the use of statistics came in very handy to decode certain type of ciphers.

The book also has some encrypted messages at the back that you can play with and decrypt using the techniques given in the book.

This book will be added to the book club (see link in sidebar) soon.