And considering all those barriers, it's a rare joy when an author can manage to put out a book that's so informative it changes the way the reader views the world. James Gleick's The Information details the history of humanity's relationship to information and the communication of information, from African talking drums to quantum computing. Gleick, whose book Chaos inspired ten thousand posters of fractals on dorm-room walls in the 1990s, and whose Genius was an ambitious biography of Richard Feynman that intertwined the story of the man with a cogent, clear explanation of his life's work, is the perfect writer to take on this kind of responsibility.

Gleick measures, ridicules, extols, and examines information in all its forms. He keeps the book moving in rough chronological order, stopping only to provide brief, snappy explanations of relevant topics. He's a chatty, amiable professor who's hell-bent on covering four years' worth of education in a single semester, and so he introduces us to Gödel, Donne, Morse, and hundreds of the sharpest minds the world has ever known at a brutally fast pace. The Information isn't a skimmable book. It demands your full attention, and Gleick is so excited about the topic that giving him your attention never feels like a chore, even when you have to reread a passage two or three times to really understand it. The book gets more and more difficult as we move into the present and science begins to examine the information we've got locked inside our DNA—the information that makes us who we are—but it gets more rewarding, too. You'll marvel at how much information Gleick managed to pack inside this book, inefficiencies of the language be damned.

(Gleick reads at Town Hall tonight, and if you're on the fence about this book, I'd urge you to go listen to him speak.)