Category: Uncategorized

Eric Ambler‘s Epitaph for a spy gently drags you in to noir on the south coast of France. A name to remember for a good read. (This was an early summer read, as I continue to slowly catch up with my “summer reading.”)

Never heard of Tim Krabbé (English bio) before, but was very happy to stumble across The Rider earlier this summer in an airport bookstore. While Krabbé is better known for his chess and his screenplays, he pedaled seriously on a bicycle earlier his his life. The Rider recounts a one-day race, as an amateur, from start to finish. Written in Dutch in 1978, the thin volume (148 pages) appeared in an English edition in 2002. I’ve only competed in one road race, but the mix of introspective dialogue and competitive evaluation feels spot on. Glad it was translated.

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith started the tales of Precious Ramotswe, the Botswanan private detective. These stories are widely known, with a first movie coming to HBO soon. I enjoyed the introduction, and will look forward to the eight others in the series in future reading.

Kudos to those who put together Sunday Streets, closing off 5 miles of San Francisco streets for 4 hours on a Sunday morning. Labor Day Weekend often serves up pleasant weather, but this morning we didn’t even have to wait for the fog to burn off. Pure sun, and pleasant walking, biking, hula hooping, you-name-it weather. I don’t know the measurement of success, but I hope this trial run turns into a tradition. See you out there on September 14th, I hope.

From Vin, he of Sportscolumn and Favorite10 fame, I received Rollback, the best Robert J. Sawyer novel I’ve read to date. Per usual, simple premise opens rich exposition of some eternal questions. The narrator’s wife Sarah decoded an alien message (a la Carl Sagan’s Contact) long ago. Now, another message has arrived.

But Sarah is 87 years old and failing, like her husband. To keep her alive for the message interpretation, a very wealthy software mogul pays for her body to be “rolled back” for extra life, via gene rejuvenation. Sarah insists that her husband Don also receive the expensive treatment, to resigned acceptance.

The twist? The rejuvenation only works for Don. Exploration ensues of what’s it like to be young again, with all the knowledge of a life fully lived already. What pulls you in is the mixed emotions of Don’s family, from wife Sarah to children and grandchildren. The rejuvenation brings his appearance and strength back to that of a man in his 20s, and he finds himself attracted to a young woman scientist who is much like his wife Sarah when they first met 60-odd years ago. It’s complicated, but interesting without being preachy. I’d recommend this novel ahead of other Sawyer books, and before many others generally.

Sawyer always blends multiple scientific themes in his stories, without ever leaving the human personalities behind. In this one, he does it all very well. Rollback was a Hugo Award finalist in 2008. If Rollback didn’t win, then I want to read the other finalists.

Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire was an airport pickup. As you might expect, this historical fiction re-telling the tale of the battle of Thermopylae got a boost from the successful movie 300. This book didn’t improve upon the movie, but history needs personality to stay alive, and this “first person” account keeps the basics straight while adding plenty of imagined color. And blood and guts, of course. Not pure history, but Herodotus can wait.

After the original announcement on June 23rd, and some revisions tested starting July 14th, CNET’s redesign is open to all as of yesterday, August 27th. See for yourself at CNET.com, CNET News, and CNET Download.com. Congrats to all who worked on it. I’ve had my say kibitzing from the outside; I also know how much work went into it.

I’m impressed by the deliberate, public nature of the changes, and the aesthetic is fine, if not as iconic as yellow and green.

One design quibble: I find the lowercasing of “news” and “download.com” to be affected, especially given that text references continue to capitalize, but whatever. But I’m grateful the unnecessary reflection on the sub-brands of CNET News and Download.com was dropped from the design. News uses the CNET favicon, as it has forever. I noticed that Download.com got to keep its favicon, a slightly smaller version of this:

One navigation quibble: the tour pop-up should have its own visible, linkable URL. It’s found at http://www.cnet.com/html/cnet/tour/tour1.html. Works well on its own, without need for scrolling.

I am still waiting, however, for the change of News.com to its broader CBS usage. That team must still be hard at work, not yet enjoying pizza and beer.

The Dark Knight is still packing the IMAX theater here in San Francisco. We finally made it to the film. Big, long, full, and bold. The “excursion” to Hong Kong was a bit Jason Bourne-ish (which I like, but not in character) but otherwise, quite a headlong story. Whomever has to play the Joker in future films has an impossible act to follow. 82 from Metacritic works for me.

I have not cancelled my Netflix account, so I was able to watch Pan’s Labyrinth, the DVD I’ve had out for months. (I missed the shipping fun by just a few days.)

The mélange of history and fantasy shines. The division between the saturated color of the imagination and the stark faded light of Franco’s Spain underlines how people’s minds work hard to find something positive in even the worst situations.

Quite an imaginative film, but #4 on Metacritic’s all-time list with a 98? Not so fast. I’d recommend the movie to most anyone, but glad my expectations weren’t escalated too high ahead of time.

(Still pondering “blog bankruptcy” for the 17 — and rising — books I’ve read but not blogged. Sigh…)

Hybrids by Robert J. Sawyer is the third and final book in The Neanderthal Parallax, exploring the imagined interaction between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens via parallel universes. Hybrids completes what began in Hominids and continued in Humans.

Once again, Sawyer delves into where science and religion mix, this time “finding” the God organ in the human brain via its absence in the Neanderthal brain. Also, the military-industrial complex in human affairs comes into play, as part of general concern/suspicion about inter-species warfare if the portal between the two parallel universes is kept open indefinitely. Months after the fact, I can’t summon enthusiasm for this book, even though I enjoyed it at the time.

I will continue to read Sawyer, though, and when I find time to note Rollback, you’ll know why.