In summary – Jaron spends the book pointing out how technology sometimes exhibits unanticipated negative pressure on society. A solid example he uses is the Facebook relationship status – with only five options to choose from, it forces people to pigeonhole themselves into categories arbitrarily concocted by a developer somewhere, rather than allowing people to express their relationship (from the full range of human relationships) in the terms they prefer. There’s a subtle backchannel message going on that says “Here are the categories that society has deemed normal and acceptable, and if you can’t pick one you don’t belong.” The same goes for gender (which seems to be a contentious issue lately), sexuality, political stripes, etc, etc. Humans are very rarely easily categorized into neat boxes.

He’s definitely on to something, and the book is chock-a-block full of powerful and interesting observations about technology’s impact on creativity, freedom, economics, that really opened my eyes to the subtle effects of interfaces that even I, as a UI designer, take for granted. However! While I see where he’s coming from on a number of issues, the conclusions he draws are rarely compelling. I had a really hard time reading this book, because whatever starts off as a neat humanist observation ends up degenerating into a 10-paragraph disorganized rant around the point, sometimes further devolving into a wordy tirade about the singularity. At times I felt I was swimming around in an ocean of argument without any really solid conclusions.

Maybe he’s not the greatest writer in the world – I think a lot of the problems I had with the book could have been fixed by a good editor forcing him to consolidate his arguments. (And to stop name-dropping mercilessly!) He’s a very bright man – I think he raises a lot of really interesting issues in his book, but it’s a bit of effort to get at some of them.

Multi-billionaire creator of the VR Oasis, James Halliday, has passed away and left his enormous fortune to anyone who can solve the mysterious 80’s-themed puzzles he’s left behind. An subculture of obsessive clue-hunters forms, and teenaged Wade Watts, who’s been steeped in 80’s ephemera through his childhood, is single-mindedly devoted to solving Halliday’s labyrinthian mystery.

I want to give this one a glowing recommendation, but I think the audience who will take as much from it as I did are a really thin slice of the population. If you dig 80’s nostalgia, retro video games, and science fiction, this is a brilliant narrative that draws from all kinds of amazing reference material that tingles all the right nerve centers. But it’s a love it or hate it thing – I could see this book becoming an unbearable slog to someone who didn’t get the references, particularly if they were born too late to have lived any of it. I think the title is pretty clever – I suspect you can know from the outset if it’s for you.

The action scenes, mostly set in the VR world, are epic and hilarious. Despite the nerdy tone of the book, there’s quite a lot of good character development and a few twists to keep things interesting, including an ongoing virtual romance that Wade worries may not be what it appears.

A few beefs with the book – the characters have an implausible recollection of the most obscure 80’s details – having actually lived that decade firsthand I could scarcely remember most of the references and a bunch of it went way over my head. It hardly matters though – the clues are so vague and specific to situations in the book, that they’re impossible to solve until the characters work out their significance. I would have liked to play along!

Secondly, during a plot twist in the latter half of the book, Wade gets into some serious trouble, but suddenly starts magically exhibiting superhuman hacking skills that, while convenient for driving the story forward, seemed incredibly unlikely given everything we knew about him to that point. That bit of the story is entertaining, but I kept wondering what other magical skills he was going to manifest next time he was in trouble.

Overall a terrific read – it’s an early lead for my book of the year!

Woman in Black: Creepy! Harry Potter plays a grownup widower lawyer who has to go to a haunted house to sort through an old lady’s papers. The house is magnificently creepy and full of freaky victorian-era ephemera (a museum’s collection worth of wind-up monkeys, clowns and porcelain dolls). At first the director is patient enough to let the house and it’s creepy noises get under our skin, but then he resorts to the jumping-out-at-you-with-loud-noises cheap scares. Overall it was well put together, it’s got plenty of disturbing moments and creepy visuals, but I really felt the BOO! tactics were lazy and the film could have been much more menacing if handled in a subtler way. (I just discovered, incidentally, that this is a remake of a 1989 made-for-tv movie, which in turn was an adaptation of a stage play. Hollywood re-hash! *shakesfist*)

The Invention of Lying: Awful. I think the premise of this movie – that only one person in the world develops the capacity to lie, is super clever and amusing. Kindof the inverse of Liar Liar, where Jim Carrey can only tell the truth. But the execution is just terrible. I think Ricky Gervais (who wrote, directed, and starred) confused the notions of honesty and tact when they were putting this together. The opening act is a humiliating dinner where Jennifer Garner casually heaps insults on Ricky Gervais, followed up by his mother’s death, Jonah Hill’s suicide humor, and then his co-workers humiliate him, and he’s fired. HAHA! As far as comedies go, this one’s a stinker, and I regret not shutting it off halfway through.

Captain America: Fun! I had low expectations for Captain America, but actually really enjoyed the story about scrawny Steve Rogers juicing up on super-serum to fight the Red Skull and his uber-nazis. It takes a while before he comes out swinging, and when he finally gets going they gloss over his heroic exploits in a flashback montage. But when he finally gets to knocking heads onscreen towards the end of the film, the action scenes are pretty entertaining.

The series documents the life of Katniss Everdeen, a miner’s daughter in a dystopian future where the government annually selects children from the colonies to fight to the death in an arena as punishment for a failed rebellion. Katniss volunteers to save her sister, and gets pitted against 23 more kids who go on to brutally maim and murder eachother. It was shockingly up front with violence – a risky move for Scholastic Publishing that apparently paid off big-time. I don’t know how they’re going to present the arena scenes in the film coming out next year without going way over a PG13 rating.

Thematically it may be similar to the famously shocking Japanese movie “Battle Royale”, but it’s more character driven – we learn more than we often want to know about Katniss’ fear, failings and her increasingly pathological emotional boundaries while the tension constantly rises.

I’ve seen Suzanne Collins in interviews, and she looks like a nice person – but she seems to have a boundless capacity to torture and murder her characters. Given that it’s a story about government sanctioned killing games, it’s not spoiling anything to warn that predictably few characters make it through the entire series – it’s probably best you don’t get too attached.

It’s worth reading if you like dark science fiction. The first one was definitely the strongest, but the second book has some very cool ideas in it too. Meh on the third, but once you’ve read that far you might as well.

I want to tell you how much I loved this book, but I have to admit that the pace was infuriatingly uneven – Weisman alternates between exciting depictions of collapsing cities to long boring musings about what kind of grasses are preferred by migratory birds. A few chapters of the cataclysmic failure of the highly explosive untended oil refineries along the gulf coast, followed by a leisurely paean about the kinds of trees that one might find in a bog.

When it gets going it’s bone-chillingly great – we’re all doomed! But feel free to skip chapters if the plight of the mastadons and his poetic descriptions of post-human Africa are going on for a little too long. Don’t miss his fascinating discussions about the Pacific Gyre filling up with plastic though, or the amusing unintended re-naturing of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Lots of very neat observations and anecdotes about the kind of engineering required to last even more than a few hundred years. (Your house will be long gone – and everything in it, save for a few titanium bits in your dishwasher and some connectors from your fusebox.)

On a topical note – in the book he describes a structural engineer’s warnings regarding the impending consequences of Istanbul’s sudden growth, up from 1 to 15 million inhabitants since just 1950. Since much of the explosive growth was accommodated by easing building codes and using lowest-bid materials to erect shoddy concrete multi-storey buildings, scientists predict that the next major tremor (due within 30 years) on the North Anatolian Fault which runs right through the city could collapse as many as 50,000 apartment buildings. We had a scary preview of what could happen this evening with the earthquake in Van, Turkey. And there’s little they could do to prevent it – there’s no way to bring a city of 15 million people up to earthquake code with the clock ticking. Scary.

“When an earthquake strikes Istanbul, its narrow, winding streets will clog so totally with the rubble of thousands of wrecked buildings, Sozen estimates, that much of the city will simply have to close down for 30 years before the massive destruction can be cleared away.“

WtC is a turn-based hex-grid re-imagining of Final Fantasy Tactics, with more than a dozen character classes and tons of spells and powers. So far I can tell they put a ton of effort into it, the storyline is fun and compelling and the art is top-notch, and I’m really liking the destructible terrain, huge groups of units and weird creatures. The music is catchy, too!

One of the game mechanics they’ve introduced makes the game really interesting – you fight a series of sequential battles, where you don’t always get reinforcements. This makes it important to protect your armies, since you can’t win a war of attrition. It’s also the only tactics game I know of that lets you play multiplayer in head-to-head mode. I’m excited to try online play! Download it so we can fight!

The main character, Meg, is a confident, capable young woman with the power to “Kythe” – that is, to speak to other-dimensional beings with her mind. She goes on a quest to save her psychic brother from having his mitochondria destroyed by the evil Echthroi – a quest that takes her to a middle school, to the edge of the galaxy, and into her brother’s cells. The ending is particularly trippy – they spend about 30 pages in some kind of non-corporeal space thinking love at eachother – while all kinds of imagery is presented about dancing shrimp and singing trees. It was pretty cool – even when I wasn’t really following it.

At only 110 pages, it was an easy, fast read – I forgot how quickly I could breeze through short young-adult novels. It was a nice treat to read a book in an afternoon instead of slogging through another epic with lots of breaks in the middle.

Room is written from the perspective of Jack, a 5 year old boy who lives in a room with his mother. There’s a dark and sinister undertone to the story, but Jack, who’s never experienced life beyond the four walls of ‘Room’, is grateful for his life with Mom and uses his imagination to rationalize the images he sees on television. Things change for Jack when Mom comes up with a plan to leave room – set aside some time to read, because you won’t be able to stop. Room made my heart race and palms sweaty.

One of my friends found the dark aspects of the story exploitative of recent news stories, which I think the author addresses in her own way in the narrative. Everyone else I’ve lent it to seems to have really loved the story, and they all go on about ‘the plan’ – it’s exhilarating. Great book!

The problem with Call of Duty 2 is that they’ve spent so much effort to put you into the midst of a cinematic experience that they’re unwilling to ever deviate from the script. If you ever find yourself in the unfortunate position of receiving a grenade to the face, when you’re miraculously resurrected the entire world resets and the clockwork begins again, making death the beginning of a bizarre deja-vu precognitive experience. All the Nazis are in the same hidey-holes, all the planes fly the same trajectories, all the tanks drive the same routes.

‘Nein! It iz not fair! How do you know vere I vas hidden?’

In the snow level in particular… I must have died about 15 times under mortar fire trying to figure out what I was supposed to do (I should have zigged instead of zagged), so as my reincarnation count added up I became a lethal psychic assassin, standing in the center of a town square and picking off hidden nazis through windows and behind fences, tossing grenades into the path of expected patrols. Even weirder, the other soldiers seem oblivious. I have personally wiped out entire platoons before they ever saw it coming, and my buddies keep telling me to hurry it up.

I think it could be made into a movie concept – like Groundhog Day but with tanks.

It turns out that I was hallucinating or something, because after I bought the book I couldn’t find any record of who said that, it’s -not- part of Canada Reads, and in fact there was no literature panel on Q the week I believe I heard it. I think dark Obeah magic made me buy it and read it. Which is fantastic, because it’s an excellent story.

I won’t go into much further detail about the plot, because that one line will hopefully grab you as it grabbed me. But there are two really important observations I want to make about this book:

1) The book is narrated in a really thick but setting-appropriate Jamaican Patois. The first few chapters I thought my brain was going to melt out of my head, working harder to interpret than understand. Towards the midway point I was reading it pretty fluently, but expect to slog slowly through all the “Lawd, pickney, de cow cain’t milk sheself!“. It adds a fantastic depth and richness to the story, but it’s hard to read. Language-wise it may also be interesting to note that they drop the N-bomb every second sentence, which is used entirely in proper context, but still made me squeamish.

2) The life of a slave, as presented in this book, is every bit (and more) tragic, merciless, debasing and brutal as you can imagine. I expected it to be pretty bleak, but the author goes to great lengths to expose you to cruelty, torture and savagery. It’s not for the faint of heart. The more terribly they’re abused, though, the more savoury their plan for revenge becomes. I don’t know: were all plantation owners insanely violent short-tempered sociopaths? This guy’s really a piece of work.

Really happy that I picked this book up – it’s a real page-turner, and it’s given me a lot of insight into a setting I knew very little about, and inspired me to follow up with some research into the real-life history of the period.