This is the second of four Sherlock Holmes novels. The only one I’d read previously was the third, The Hound of the Baskervilles, so it appears I’ll be reading these in the most bizarre order I can manage. This does make a few references to A Study in Scarlet, I believe, but it doesn’t seem like the order in the series matters all that much.

After annually receiving a mysterious and incredibly valuable pearl in the mail for the past six years, Mary Morstan was delivered a letter asking her to finally meet the unknown sender. He had some information on her father, who had gone missing years ago. The letter asked that she not involve the police, but she was still able to enlist the help of Holmes and Watson.

It turns out the pearls were from a treasure that her father had stolen while serving with the British East India Company (similar to Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone) and it’s now been passed down to her. But wait! Murder! Robbery! Mysteries to be solved!

Unlike Baskervilles, in which Watson acted alone for the most part, we get to follow Sherlock for the entirety of the novel. Having him around for the whole story was both an advantage and a detriment, I think. I enjoy his character being involved (although Watson can really become a kiss-ass in his company, at times), but I think he’s too perfect in a way. The story becomes much too straight-forward, with no red herrings and no real mystery. Sherlock knew who did it and then he catches him. At least in Baskervilles, not having Sherlock around allowed us to try and piece together the mystery and make mistakes before he arrived at the end to Scooby-Doo the culprit.

The last thirty pages of the book consists of a character describing how the treasure came into his possession. It was a very strange choice, I thought, to essentially tie-up the mystery and end with such a large chunk of back-story. It seemed like he could have come up with a slightly more elegant way of weaving that in.

Though not as much as the other Sherlock stories I’ve read, I did really enjoy this. Something about his writing just draws me in. I’ll eventually make my way through all the Sherlock stories, but it occurred to me while reading this that I really need to pick up The Lost World. I have a feeling I’ll love that.

I really like the Dalai Lama. I never thought I would, to be honest, but the more I read from him the more I see he’s someone with a real grounding in reality and science. I suppose my vision of him has been skewed somewhat by middle-class, new-agey white folk selling cancer-healing crystals at $60 a pop, but there’s definitely sincerity and real intelligence behind his advice.

[...] as the peoples of the world become ever more closely interconnected in an age of globalization and in multicultural societies, ethics based in any one religion would only appeal to some of us; it would not be meaningful for all. In the past, when peoples lived in relative isolation from one another — as we Tibetans lived quite happily for many centuries behind our wall of mountains — the fact that groups pursued their own religiously based approaches to ethics posed no difficulties. Today, however, any religion-based answer to the problem of our neglect of inner values can never be universal, and so will be inadequate. What we need today is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: a secular ethics.

Beyond Religion is about viewing ethics from a secular understanding, that religion, while helpful to many, is not necessary for living a compassionate and moral life. It covers his view on approaching ethics through an understanding of everyone’s shared humanity, our shared aspiration to happiness and avoidance of suffering, which I know sounds like a wishy-washy load of nonsense, but he manages to articulate it in a way that’s both interesting and a bit inspiring.

He finishes with introducing the basics of meditation and mindfulness. I always thought of meditation as purely a device for relaxation, and never really gave it much consideration beyond that. He presents it more as taking a time-out during the day to focus on cultivating your inner values and ridding yourself of destructive emotions, and I do like the idea of that.

Oh god, I’m starting to sound like such a dirty hippie.

One of the key points I took away from The Art of Happiness was the idea that your emotions aren’t the result of someone else’s actions, but a result of how you choose to react to those actions. No one can make you angry; you choose to react with anger, and when you do so, you’re essentially making the choice to feel shitty. When coupled with making a conscious effort to understand the motivations of others and finding a way to relate, the thought actually does help calm me down, so I could certainly see how putting aside time each day to concentrate on reminding oneself to let go of emotionally debilitating thoughts could be very beneficial.

I listened to the Audible recording for this, in which Martin Sheen was the narrator. He did a great job. He has that gentle, wise old man voice that fits quite well here.

This is the 20th Discworld novel, and in it the Hogfather has gone missing. It’s absolutely imperative that the children get their presents on Hogswatch morning, so Death takes up the mantle (or in this case, the red and white suit stuffed with a pillow). The fate of the Discworld may depend on him.

I always forget how much I love Terry Pratchett, and then I finally get around to reading another of his books, and I LOVE TERRY PRATCHETT. I thought I only read the beginning of Hogfather in high school, but about 200 pages in I finally realized I’d already read the entire thing. I was thinking oh right, that happens quite a bit during this. It was like an entire book length of déjà vu.

Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

Even as a re-read, this was great. I tend to think of Pratchett as an enjoyable read, something quick and fun, but I always forget how sharp his satire is and how perfect his characters are. Thankfully I have 20+ books of his still to read.

I expected to read a lot during the holidays. I was visiting my hometown, where I only really keep in touch with one friend, and I figured I’d be able to blast through quite a few books during my downtime, considering all of my time would be down. Unfortunately, I become obsessed with achieving Steam holiday objectives and barely read at all.

I did get through a couple of books, though, and A Christmas Carol was one of them. I grew up watching the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol nearly every year with my dad. It’s the longest running of the few Christmas traditions we’ve had over the years. As a kid, my dad used to cancel Christmas at least once every year, one season we got up to six cancellations, and for a five-year stint we were forced to watch John Wayne movies every Christmas afternoon, but A Christmas Carol is really the only tradition to last into adulthood.

As part of the Audible Signature Classics, a series of audiobook productions on Audible in which famous actors lend their voices to the narration of classic literature, Tim Curry presents Dickens’ holiday novella. How could you go wrong there? Curry has one of the greatest voices, so his narration was obviously top-notch. It really enhanced the reading, I thought.

“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

I read half of Great Expectations when I was younger, and have been meaning to give it another try since. I remember reading that Dickens’ work was published in serial monthly installments that were required to be of a certain length, and as a result I spent my time identifying what I felt were extraneous descriptions rather than just enjoying it. A Christmas Carol is probably a much better introduction to Dickens anyway. It’s a short, familiar story that offers a quick taste of his interesting characters, hilarious wit, and loving use of the language. Reading this got me a little excited to move on to some of his longer works.

“If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

Hope everyone had a great holiday!

I must have watched this movie half a dozen times in my last year of high school, against my will. I enjoyed it at first, but enough is enough you stoner high-schoolers. We don’t need to watch this at every social gathering.

It’s been over a decade now, so I felt it was safe to have a peek at the novel. I actually don’t remember much of the movie anymore (somehow), and I went in thinking this was entirely fiction. After reading the Wikipedia page just now, I see that it’s actually an autobiographical account of two seperate Vegas trips merged into one and wrapped in a “fictional framework”. We know his two reasons for being in Vegas were real, but everything else seems to be up in the air.

So, the plot. It’s not really about plot, and as a result there really isn’t much of one. It’s split into two parts. In the first part, journalist Raoul Duke and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, head to Vegas to cover the Mint 400, an off-road desert race, for Sports Illustrated. They make a brief appearance at the race, but mainly spend the time getting high in their hotel room. For the second half of the book, they’re asked to stick around and cover the National District Attorneys Association’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. This half is more lively, as they spend time mingling with the conference patrons and searching the city for the American Dream.

American Dream? Wasn’t that an old discotheque? I think it’s closed down now.

What makes me think this book is more fiction than fact is that everything goes perfectly. Pretty much every situation and conversation they find themselves in goes about as well as it possibly could, everything from getting pulled over by a cop with a car full of drugs and weapons, so stoned he’s unaware of the beer still in his hand, to attacking a maid while nude in a freshly-destroyed hotel room that was registered under a real name. The idea of them being able to weasel out of every situation, whether with wit or luck, seems like the fantasy of a stoner who quietly locked himself in a hotel room for a week and didn’t bother anyone.

But it is fun, I will give you that. And hilarious at times. He seems to perfectly capture the atmosphere of being off your head and up for anything in a wild town in the middle of a desert. The illustrations by Ralph Steadman were a nice addition too. This is my first read of Thompson’s, the man who invented Gonzo journalism, so I am interested in reading some of his other work. I like his writing style, and I’d like to see it applied to something I know is real.

Hiro Protagonist, a sword-wielding hacker, and Y.T., a 15-year-old skateboarding courier, struggle to stop the spread of Snow Crash, a digitally and visually transmitted…ancient herpes…from space.

This book is a staple in geek culture. People just love it, and in a way I can see why. The technology described in Snow Crash was way ahead of its time. It was published before the first graphical web browser was even invented and managed to describe what would eventually become Google Earth. It also features an internationally networked virtual environment accessed through the use of a headset, a trope that is still very prevalent in modern science-fiction (such as Caprica and Ready Player One), and something we’ll likely have in a decade or two. Stephenson apparently also popularized the term ‘avatar’ in this book. It’s impressively forward-looking.

But OH MY GOD EXPOSITION IN MY FACE. I’ve never read this much info-dumping in my life. This puts Dan Brown to shame. At least he only takes a couple of pages to explain something. If you need a third of a book of pure exposition to explain the main conflict, it’s maybe a sign that it’s a bit too convoluted.

I did enjoy some of his writing style, though. Combined with Jonathon Davis’ narration, it moved along brilliantly at times. The opening scene is one of my favourite opening scenes this year. The reader doesn’t know what’s happening at first, but gradually pieces it together throughout the first chapter. It’s hilariously absurd and fast-paced, but still manages to do a great job of introducing the world.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book doesn’t live up to that opening scene. It’s peppered throughout with some fun moments, but as a whole the plot is a bit of a mess and everything to do with the virus is handled so clumsily that it comes off as silly.

Snow Crash has a lot of problems, but overall I still found it entertaining. I’m tempted to read some of Neal Stephenson’s later work, with the hope that his story-telling has gotten better over the years. I’m certainly interested in what his vision of our future might be these days.

I first heard about this little book when Stephen Fry mentioned it favourably on Twitter, and since I am powerless to his suggestions, I added it to my next Amazon shipment. It’s taken me a long time to get around to it, but I’m glad I did.

The title of the book really says it all. This is a collection of forty vignettes that imagine different afterlife scenarios. They range from comical to heartbreaking, and each one is perfectly sized but could easily inspire longer pieces. The amount of creativity packed into this is astonishing. As someone who used to talk about writing fiction a lot but could never focus on a strong idea, this book makes me want to uninstall my word processor and curl up in the fetal position.

I often struggle with short story collections, as I find it hard to keep interest through the stop and go of so many stories in a row, but I didn’t have that problem with this book. It’s very short, just over a hundred pages, so my mind didn’t really have time to wander. Each story is also only two to three pages long, so I found myself thinking just one more a lot.

Very glad I picked this up. One of the more memorable books I’ve read this year.

The basic premise of this book is that we should pay more attention to our initial gut reaction when making decisions, as having more information can often lead to making worse decisions, except if you haven’t spent enough time honing the particular skill and knowledge set you’re basing the decision on, because then it could lead to shooting an innocent dude 41 times. So…be careful with that.

I liked this book a lot. It’s not really going to change how you make decisions, but it does provide chapter after chapter of interesting anecdotes showing both the positive and negative aspects of ‘thin slicing’ – that is, interpreting a small amount of immediate information with preconcieved notions and previous experience. Malcolm Gladwell is a great storyteller, and he’s found some really interesting examples.

It is quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent only twenty minutes thinking about us to come to a better understanding of who we are than people who have known us for years.

It’s not fair to say it won’t change how you make decisions. He does provide examples where understanding how powerful our initial unconcious biases are have lead us to take steps to negate their effect on our decisions. In one example he writes about how orchestras around the world are now placing a screen up to hide musicians during the audition process, and since doing so the number of women being accepted has skyrocketed. Gladwell believes we should apply this to other scenarios as well, such as in courtrooms where, for instance, a jury may be deciding the fate of an innocent man who happens to wear a black hat and an eye patch and maybe a moustache and also has a hairless cat or maybe a snake. These things can really mess with your judgement.

Recommended for the interesting and well-told anecdotes. I’ve finally read a Malcolm Gladwell book, and I have a feeling I’ll be reading more in the future.

George R.R. Martin juggles a lot of characters in this series, in much the same way Robert Jordon did in his Wheel of Time series. The difference was that Martin knew how to pull it off. Jordon would develop a very cool storyline with one of his viewpoint characters, really suck you in, and then you wouldn’t hear from that character for ages. I specifically remember being enthralled with Perrin’s storyline, and then he wasn’t mentioned for 1200 pages. Every time I finished a chapter I was hoping the next would follow him. so it made for a frustrating and disappointing read. By the time we got back to him, a year had passed and he was a completely different person.

Unfortunately, Martin went a bit Jordon with this one. Apparently when he was half finished this book, he realised it was just going to be too long, so rather than cutting it down to a manageable size, he decided to split the book in two. A feast for Crows features all the characters that no one cares about, and A Dance with Dragons will go back in time to the beginning of this book and follow all the fun characters through the same timeline.

Wha?

I guess I can’t comment until I read A Dance with Dragons. Maybe it worked wonderfully and wasn’t just a case of an author becoming too big to listen to his editor, as it initially appears. And this book isn’t all lame characters. It does follow a couple of my favourites.

I’m just not a big fan of being introduced to a lot of new characters midway through a series, and this book had a lot of that. He’s just such a damn good writer, though, and he managed to hook me anyway. The first 80 pages of this book doesn’t have a single character or setting that we’ve seen before, but I still found it gripping. I am stubborn and have the attention span of a goldfish, so this is high praise indeed.

The book did slog along at times. I enjoy Cersei’s storyline for the most part, but there was just too much of her in this for me. And after watching the HBO series, I can’t get Lena Headey’s constipated face out of my mind while reading her, which really doesn’t help. Less Cersei and more Arya would have worked better for me.

Feast did have some great twists and horrific moments, though, and the long build up does add to the poignancy of those scenes. It is a very good book. I don’t mean to rag on it, this just happened to be the first of the series that I felt was stretched a little thin in parts.

I still recommend the whole series. I’m looking forward to reading A Dance with Dragons, but I’m going to hold off until next year for that.

The story takes place 30 years from now, in a somewhat generic dystopia. Wade Watts lives in a trailer stack with his hateful aunt. Life sucks, so he spends most of his time logged in to the OASIS – a virtual reality world that started life as a MMO game and is now used for everything from schooling to business transactions. The man who created the OASIS, James Halliday, left in his will 240 billion dollars to anyone who could find his hidden easter egg. He was obsessed with the 80s, so the easter egg hunters study all media from that decade in an attempt to search for hints that will lead them to their fortune. Wade Watts is one of those hunters.

One issue I had right away is that I just didn’t like the main characters very much. They were major geek wish-fulfillment in the worst way, and it came off a little douchey. During one conversation, Wade Watts and his best friend were explaining obscure gaming trivia to someone at a party. They fist-bumped throughout the conversation, and when Wade finished with a particularily stunning fact, they ‘double high fived’ and the crowd around them burst into applause. I wish I was joking.

New rule: one fist-bump maximum per conversation, and no double high five-ing ever.

Born in the early 80s, I was young enough to not really know what was going on in the world of music until later, and my movie knowledge was probably limited to The Goonies and Indiana Jones, but I was somewhat current on a lot of games during the later half of the decade. It’s a little strange to me that someone would write a young adult novel that focuses so heavily on nostalgia for a decade that young adults wouldn’t have even been born in, let alone lived through, and the novel really suffers from that. Almost all of the 80s references are painstakingly explained in detail, which takes all of the fun out of catching them yourself. Can you really be nostalgic about something that you need explained? While a few of the references are incoporated into the plot in a fun way, that majority are just listed out. Like literally listed out, at one point. In five minute long lists.

I think this book may have rubbed me the wrong way partly because I’m growing a bit tired of nostalgia lately. I love, with all my heart, the video games and movies of my childhood, but it feels like geek culture has become all about looking back. So much media just seems to be fan service. The reason we have all this cool stuff to fondly look back on is because geeks weren’t stuck in the past back then. All this nostalgia does not bode well for future entertainment.

Despite all my negativity, I did enjoy this book. I may be hating on nostalgia, but I do still get the warm tinglies when someone mentions John Hughes or Yars Revenge. Wil Wheaton’s narration, something I figured was going to eventually wear on me, was also fantastic. I look forward to listening to more from him.