Books
This has been a good month for books. After a year of having the attention span of a gnat, I'm finally back into the book-devouring habit - I've finished seven books this month, and four of those were read in single sittings over the last four evenings*.
Here's the list - most of which is made up of a pile of books I bought ages ago in an attempt to diversify my intake from a diet of uninterrupted science fiction...
Dan Brown - The DaVinci Code: not too bad, but not particularly awesome either. Neither the "must-read of the year" nor the "insidiously easy-reading rubbish" that it's been made out to be, really - just a fairly run-of-the-mill thriller with conspiracy theories and random factoids wedged into it. Went to see the film a couple of days after the book, which IMO was much better - Dan Brown doesn't really do dialogue particularly well, nor pacing, and the film gets rid of a lot of the stuff which was irrelevant, oddly-timed or just plain silly in the book.
Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead: the writing style of this book stumped me at first - it was written in 1943, in a style that Wikipedia tells me is of the Romantic movement. Its prose is miles from anything I've read before (at least, read more than a couple of pages of), and the characters are bizarre - behaving more as archetypes than in the manner of a real person. Nonetheless, once I slogged past the first few chapters (which took me several months) I got used to the style, and found myself really rather enjoying it.
Richard Morgan - Market Forces: I actually began this one in Invergarry a couple of months ago (which I still haven't journalled about) but it took me a while to pick it back up again. Cynical, cool, violent, and scarily plausible near-future stuff, set in a London where capitalism has been taken to its logical extremes. Apparently, Morgan was a lecturer in Economics at Strathclyde for a while - I'm somewhat curious as to what his lectures were like.
Charles Stross - Accelerando: I discovered Charles Stross via a link to his website (probably from the Gaimanblog) which has some of his short fiction. Turns out he actually wrote Rogue Farm, which was turned into a short 3D film, which we watched at Glasgow Anime. I picked up Accelerando in Borders at lunchtime a few days back, sat down against a wall and started reading. Two hours later, I went to get a coffee and sat reading in a patch of sunlight in George Square. When the sun disappeared I walked home, still reading. I didn't put the book down until I'd finished it. Cool stuff, although the changes of pace and style (the book takes place over several time periods) made for slightly patchy reading - I felt as if I'd started reading Snow Crash, and then halfway through had switched to a Stephen Baxter or a Greg Egan novel.
Polly Evans - Fried Eggs With Chopsticks: an interesting and somewhat amusing, but fairly light-weight, account of a trip through the modern China.
Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: It's been a long time since I've closed a book and just sat there, stunned, going 'Wow.' A short, bittersweet slice of awesome.
Al Franken - Lies, and the Lying Liars That Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right: funny, irreverent, and really scary deconstruction of the American 'liberal media'. I always thought the American right wing were crazy, but I hadn't realised quite how far they'd go and how low they'd sink. Plus, it has a skit about a boat full of politicians stuck in Vietnam, and a comic about Supply-Side Jesus, therefore it trumps Michael Moore for amusement factor.
* When I say evening, I actually mean from the hours of about 1am, when I get bored, til 8am, when I fall asleep. My sleep schedule is as royally screwed as ever...
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I'm also making some progress with my mobile mapping project for work, for the first time in several months. During term-time, I was devoting a lot of energy to group projects - in the first semester, I ended up pretty much doing most of my team's work by myself (or, worse, delegating tasks then having to re-do them myself because the results were totally unusable), and in the second semester GizmoBall basically sucked up every spare hour I had. So, I'm back into summer now, and back on track. Hopefully I'll have something interesting working within the next couple of weeks.
Here's the list - most of which is made up of a pile of books I bought ages ago in an attempt to diversify my intake from a diet of uninterrupted science fiction...
Dan Brown - The DaVinci Code: not too bad, but not particularly awesome either. Neither the "must-read of the year" nor the "insidiously easy-reading rubbish" that it's been made out to be, really - just a fairly run-of-the-mill thriller with conspiracy theories and random factoids wedged into it. Went to see the film a couple of days after the book, which IMO was much better - Dan Brown doesn't really do dialogue particularly well, nor pacing, and the film gets rid of a lot of the stuff which was irrelevant, oddly-timed or just plain silly in the book.
Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead: the writing style of this book stumped me at first - it was written in 1943, in a style that Wikipedia tells me is of the Romantic movement. Its prose is miles from anything I've read before (at least, read more than a couple of pages of), and the characters are bizarre - behaving more as archetypes than in the manner of a real person. Nonetheless, once I slogged past the first few chapters (which took me several months) I got used to the style, and found myself really rather enjoying it.
Richard Morgan - Market Forces: I actually began this one in Invergarry a couple of months ago (which I still haven't journalled about) but it took me a while to pick it back up again. Cynical, cool, violent, and scarily plausible near-future stuff, set in a London where capitalism has been taken to its logical extremes. Apparently, Morgan was a lecturer in Economics at Strathclyde for a while - I'm somewhat curious as to what his lectures were like.
Charles Stross - Accelerando: I discovered Charles Stross via a link to his website (probably from the Gaimanblog) which has some of his short fiction. Turns out he actually wrote Rogue Farm, which was turned into a short 3D film, which we watched at Glasgow Anime. I picked up Accelerando in Borders at lunchtime a few days back, sat down against a wall and started reading. Two hours later, I went to get a coffee and sat reading in a patch of sunlight in George Square. When the sun disappeared I walked home, still reading. I didn't put the book down until I'd finished it. Cool stuff, although the changes of pace and style (the book takes place over several time periods) made for slightly patchy reading - I felt as if I'd started reading Snow Crash, and then halfway through had switched to a Stephen Baxter or a Greg Egan novel.
Polly Evans - Fried Eggs With Chopsticks: an interesting and somewhat amusing, but fairly light-weight, account of a trip through the modern China.
Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: It's been a long time since I've closed a book and just sat there, stunned, going 'Wow.' A short, bittersweet slice of awesome.
Al Franken - Lies, and the Lying Liars That Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right: funny, irreverent, and really scary deconstruction of the American 'liberal media'. I always thought the American right wing were crazy, but I hadn't realised quite how far they'd go and how low they'd sink. Plus, it has a skit about a boat full of politicians stuck in Vietnam, and a comic about Supply-Side Jesus, therefore it trumps Michael Moore for amusement factor.
* When I say evening, I actually mean from the hours of about 1am, when I get bored, til 8am, when I fall asleep. My sleep schedule is as royally screwed as ever...
---
I'm also making some progress with my mobile mapping project for work, for the first time in several months. During term-time, I was devoting a lot of energy to group projects - in the first semester, I ended up pretty much doing most of my team's work by myself (or, worse, delegating tasks then having to re-do them myself because the results were totally unusable), and in the second semester GizmoBall basically sucked up every spare hour I had. So, I'm back into summer now, and back on track. Hopefully I'll have something interesting working within the next couple of weeks.