Deception Point, Digital Fortress

It's been almost a month that I've read Deception Point by Dan Brown. This one is his 2nd novel. A very fast-paced gripping adventure + thriller. Nicely woven story around NASA and the White House. However, I could guess every twist and turn in the book (against a couple in the DVC), but in the usual Dan Brown style, it has a lot of information about other stuff, like the way NASA works, sealife, asteroids, etc, that you don't just get to read a thriller; you also get to know about things related to the plot. This is what I've started liking about DB's novels.

Most of my book-reading happens on weekends, and I usually end up finishing one novel / book the same weekend. However, I couldn't get enough time to read this book on a weekend, so it actually took a lot of sessions across a week to finish this book. I actually looked forward to finishing it, a very good read.

Digital Fortress is DB's first novel. It mostly deals with cryptography and breaking codes. Since most of the material was already known to me, this one wasn't as entertaining as the other novels. Also, I could guess all of the twists / turns the book has to offer, so it was like just reading through a very predictive novel that didn't also add to my knowledge. Skip it if you already know about ciphers and cryptography. The fun part about this novel was probably the code given at the end of the book to be cracked. Which I did after spending some time on it. Clues below.

!Spoiler Warning: The series of numbers initally looked like page numbers, so I was trying out arranging the first words on those page numbers mentioned, but no luck with that. Then I tried by using the first letter on the page; again it was meaningless. I then thought that those pages could have some "theme", which could be used and break the code. However, on relooking at the numbers, they seemed to be confined between a certain min and max... which looked a lot like chapter numbers. Rest was easy to put in place.