Weekend digest – 1/29/11

Last week was a busy one, workwise. Here’s a small part of what I was doing besides work.

• Books (from the last 2 weeks)
  • Light Fantastic – By far the most fun book I read this week. I couldn’t get my hands on the first book in the Discworld series, so I was hesitant to pick this up (the second in the series). I needn’t have worried. The book is a bundle of laughs even if you don’t know what happened in the first book. Once again Rincewind finds that he has bitten off more than he can chew. Or if you are familiar with Discworld, you’ll know it must have happened : the Fates have taken something huge and eminently unchewable and thrust it into Rincewind’s mouth. Not as much funny as ‘Interesting Times‘ (my introduction to Pratchett), but still an awesome read.
  • Equal Rites – Pretty bad letdown from Light Fantastic. Don’t get me wrong. The book is still a page turner, but I found it lacking in the jokes department. Hmm.. perhaps I should stick to Rincewind-only books.
  • Isaac Asimov, The complete stories vol 1 – How can I talk ill about a book that includes ‘Nightfall’ and ‘The Last Question’? However I was less than impressed with some short stories like ‘The fun they had’. Now I have to find out if I can get my hands on vol 2.
  • Ender’s Game – About time I read this one. Despite the Hugo/Nebula awards hype, I was pretty disappointed by the book. The story just doesn’t ‘feel’ real, even in its science fiction setting. Maybe the book resonated with audiences in the 70s and 80s. Heck, I’m a sucker for deified ‘genius’ characters, but the picture I get of the Wiggin kids is plainly two-dimensional. I cannot bring myself to believe that 11 year old kids can talk, think or behave like that.
  • Starship Titanic – I’m not going to waste more time on this book by writing a review for it. You’ll do better to read H2G2 again.

• Movies (No spoilers here. Go ahead and read)
  • Iron Man 2 – Gratuitous CG with a plot so bad I was beginning to wonder if the writers put some effort into writing a bad script. If you’ve seen Iron Man 1, you’re getting nothing new here.
  • Princess Mononoke – What is it with these ‘epic’ Japanese animated movies? First ‘Akira’ now this. How is this tripe on a list of 500 greatest movies ever ?
  • The Machinist – Kudos to Bale for his dedication. The acting was tight and kept a gloomy and miserable atmosphere believable. The last 10 minutes during which the plot’s mystery unravels were unfortunately its worst 10 minutes for me. I prefer Fight Club to this.

• Music
  • The Bird and The Bee – A couple of tracks from their 2009 release Ray Guns Are Not The Future have me hooked. ‘Love letter to Japan’ and ‘What’s in the Middle’ are particularly good. Give it a listen.
  • Metric – Heard about them only yesterday, but their 2009 release Fantasies is pretty awesome. ‘Gold Guns Girls’ and ‘Front Row’ are very good.
  • Tiny Vipers – I’ve had ‘They might follow you’ on a loop for most of this week. The piece is from her early self titled album.

• Misc
  • Flash should be derezzed (which reminds me; the TRON:Legacy soundtrack is awesome, albeit a tad repetitive). I’ve lost track of how many youtube and grooveshark pages I’ve had to reload because the flash plugin crashed in ubuntu.

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