This is the rare seven hundred page nonfiction book I was actually sad to finish, which surprised me given how technical some of the middle stretches get. Gleick starts with African talking drums, an example I did not expect and loved for exactly that reason, a genuinely encoded long distance communication system that predates anything we usually credit as “information technology” by centuries, and uses it to build toward the idea that information itself, not matter or energy, might be the more fundamental thing the universe is built from. From there it’s a fairly direct line through the telegraph, Shannon’s information theory, cybernetics, genetics as a coding problem, and into quantum computing by the end.

I’ll admit the cryptography and quantum computing chapters lost me some, and I don’t think that’s an unusual reaction, a few other readers I’ve compared notes with said the same about those exact sections. What kept me reading through the parts I didn’t fully follow was Gleick’s instinct for the human story sitting underneath the technical one, Ada Lovelace, Claude Shannon at Bell Labs, the sheer social upheaval of the telegraph collapsing distance for the first time in human history the way the internet would do again a century later. He’s working a difficult subject and mostly handling it with real clarity, though there are a few stretches, particularly late on, where I felt like the prose was reaching for authority on ideas it hadn’t fully metabolized itself, a complaint I’ve seen leveled at the book elsewhere and one I’d only partially push back on.

What I keep coming back to is how the book reframes something you use every day, a text message, a DNA test, a bit flipping on a hard drive, as part of one continuous historical thread going back to drumbeats crossing a village at night. It’s dense. It asks real patience in places. But it’s the kind of dense that leaves you looking at ordinary things differently afterward, which for me is the whole point of reading a book like this in the first place.