What can you tell me about The Cuckoo's Egg, by Cliff Stoll?

Glad you asked. Clifford Stoll's book is the latest one I've read, so I have it fresh enough in my mind to give an opinion.

At the anecdotal level, this is the story of how Stoll, astronomer by profession and "computer wizard" by chance, followed the trail of a 75-cent accounting error in Lawrence Berkeley Lab's computer logs to find himself in a battle of wits against a cracker looking for US of A military secrets in the Arpanet, the homo erectus equivalent to today's homo habilis Internet.

What emerges from this tale, though, is the conversion of a liberal into a conservative. (This cannot be called subtext, for Stoll does bring up the subject towards the end of the book.) Stoll describes himself as a hippie, and displays a anti-authoritarian and irreverent attitude, as well as a reluctance to trust the government and its agencies. However, as the cracker's attacks continue, they become personal to him, and he gets more and more protective of his computers and decides that maybe the alphabet soup agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA) do serve a less darker purpose than he thought at first: helping stop such criminals and protect others' property.

This all surfaces in an exchange he has with a friend; as Stoll describes the cracker's actions to her, she's quick to defend them, claiming the cracker is an anti-authoritarian just like Stoll. He, on the other hand, will have none of it: the cracker is an intruder and a thief who has been getting a free ride for from LDL's servers.

Perhaps this goes to prove that there's some truth in the old adage: "A liberal is a conservative who hasn't been mugged."

But enough about Stoll's book. I've had the saddest experience with it, for it took me the best part of last year to read through it. Oh, it's not as if it was a bad read, or a boring one at that. It's just that always something came between me and my reading, and my reading might have been a tough one, anyway, having taken pencil in hand and marking sections of the book, writing comments, making observations...

That just wasn't natural for me. The way I read a book, I let it wash over me, let its prose lead the way while I follow, maybe just taking a moment to reflect in a bright turn of phrase, a wicked choice of words, the possibilities of an idea stated between the lines.

In other words, I need to get back to the kind of reading that provides pleasure. To quote from Jonathan Franzen:

Think of the novel as lover: Let's stay home tonight and have a great time. Just because you're touched where you want to be touched, it doesn't mean you're cheap; before a book can change you, you have to love it.

Or as John Barth puts it in "Dunyazadiad", the first of three tales in his book Chimera:

Narrative, in short... [is] a love-relation...: its success [depends] upon the reader's consent and cooperation, which [they can] withhold or at any moment withdraw; also upon [their] own combination of experience and talent for enterprise, and the author's ability to arouse, sustain and safisfy [their] interest...

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds.
—William Ellery Channing, clergyman and writer (1780-1842)