reading 2013 » Lavonardo

Vadelmavenepakolainen

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Apr 202013

Vadelmavenepakolainen cover Vadelmavenepakolainen by Miikka Nousiainen had been on my “todo”-list for a long while. Finally got to reading it while nursing a slight flu back in January, and was quite impressed. After all, it was the author’s debut.

The novel is a tale about a finnish man who is not happy with his nationality – he wants to be a swede, no matter what the cost. Not just a swede by nationality, but a man fully converted into one.

And while such an identity crisis is easily described, it takes a whole book to resolve matters. After all, it is a tremendous change.

And a humorous change, the story of the protagonist veers between absurdism and obsession, and the pages flow fast while reading.

Unavoidably, there’s some repetition, but that only adds to the manic nature of the changing man.

Vadelmavenepakolainen was a pleasant surprise, I aim to tackle the author’s later books with a shorter interval from the publication dates.

The Perfect Thing

gadgets, reading 2013 No Responses »

Apr 182013

The Perfect Thing cover Steven Levy’s The Perfect Thing is yet another digital history book from the prolific author. The Perfect Thing chronicles the history of iPod (and leaves off with a short segue to the iPhone).

While the subject is far more common knowledge than that of his earlier “Hackers”, it’s nonetheless an interesting and enlightening book.

Desite its pedigree, The Perfect Thing is less about technology, and more about the people behind the device and its impact on society and habits.

But it’s not all about changes in music consumption – the first steps of the iPod’s history do contain interesting anecdotes about the technologies evaluated and especially about the comparison to competition.

The book has quite a personal perspective, the author talks about his own devices and music collection a lot, and a lot of the comments by industry players have not been gleaned from media, but from the interviews he conducted with them. The author regularly sounds more like a fanboy than an objective observer.

At least from my perspective (skewed very hard to pro-Apple camp) that’s but a minor fault.

The Perfect Thing is entertaining, I was sure of that. But it’s also rather shallow, and I kept expecting more.

Fractal Prince

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Apr 072013

Fractal Prince cover Hannu Rajaniemi’s Quantum Thief was an unexpected breakthrough – a finnish science fiction author actually storming the bookshelves and kindles of the world.

The story continues in Fractal Prince (see also the wikipedia entry).

The plot is told from multiple viewpoints with two clear protagonists. They, while initially independent, tangle towards the end of the book. Thus the narrative structure is a bit simpler than that of the first volume.

But that simplicity is an illusion. One of the many in this book. The Fractal Prince is packed to the brim with them. The plot is not that complex, but it is resolved in a very complex fashion. Multi-layered virtualities abound, and nothing is explained.

That complexity might actually be a concrete failure in the book. I’m not looking for a full walkthrough, but it would be nice to have a gallery of dramatis personae and a list of concepts spelled out. Preferably in an appendix so as not to clutter the rollercoaster pace of the adventure. Even if no such appendix exists in the book, I wasn’t too surprised to find one at the most probable location.

This book certainly is an adventure. The greatest thief of the solar system is on a mission, and any barriers, virtual, physical or psychological are just obstacles to be entertainingly overcome. But the tools and methods are at times bordering on the incomprehensible, and that sadly saps the entertainment value. There’s less science in the fiction, but that’s only to be expected since half of the storyline happens in a quasi-arabian-nights environment.

Fractal Prince is definitely more complex tale than its predecessor, and makes little sense without it (preferably re-read just before diving into this). The author has at least one more book planned in the series, and I certainly am looking forward to the conclusion. With the knowledge that I’ll have to re-read both earlier volumes before the conclusion to make the most out of it.

Waiting for Godot

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Jan 262013

Waiting for Godot cover The second book of the year (not counting graphic novels) was Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (the wikipedia page works very well as a Cliff’s Notes for the work).

This is not a long book. My edition clocked in around a hundred-odd pages.

And it’s not a book with a complicated plot or plentiful action. Nope. This is a two-act play in which very little happens. It’s like a slow motion two-part Seinfeld episode with an extremely low budget towards the end of the season.

The cast is tiny. Most of the time there’s just two men on stage. And even at its most crowded there’s just five people in the whole story.

The plot is almost inconsequential – Waiting for Godot is not about big deeds and bigger drama, it’s about – indeed – waiting for Godot. Who is, at best a remote acquintance of the two protagonists, but for unexplained reasons they are unable to leave without having a word with him.

What is left is dialogue. And there’s massive amounts of it, as the Vladimir and Estragon have nothing but words and shabby clothes. And almost the whole length is spent on the former (though the latter do put in occasional appearances).

But despite the overwhelming dialogue (it meanders, metamorphoses and catches the characters unawares at times) there’s no clarity or closure. The play begins and ends with us very little wiser on what is happening.

I’m sure the effect of the play would be even stronger on stage – reading just scratches the surface on what good actors can accomplish. Too bad there seems to be no local theatrest taking on Huomenna Hän Tulee this spring.

TL; DR: He doesn’t show up.

Rise of Videogame Zinesters

computer games, interactive fiction, photography, reading 2013, video games No Responses »

Jan 202013

Rise of the Videogame Zinesters cover The first book I read this year was Anna Anthropy’s Rise of Videogame Zinesters.

It’s a short book on a very good topic: democratization of videogame creation.

In the age of expensive, publisher-driven, minimum-risk AAA games, there’s clearly a niche for interesting, topical alternatives written by a minimal team.

And that’s exactly what this book promotes: an era when videogames have been taken back from the few big publishers, when the barrier of entry has been lowered and the barrier of discovery kept really low symmetrically.

However, behind the admirable aims, the execution leaves quite a bit to be desired. Currently the outlook of gaming is far from the bleak present laid out in the initial chapter – the indie games movement has significantly expanded frontiers, and the era of the appstores has eliminated the need to court publishers for an audience. Even the basic premise “games are for white males interested in shooting each other in the face” is increasingly less valid even in the mainstream – apart from the annual Call of Duty-dose (and its colleagues), it’s quite a varied world out there (especially outside the consoles where both development and distribution costs are orders of magnitude lower).

The answer to the dearth of interesting games is for the gamers to create new ones and distribute them.

Certainly a noble target, and the author both describes quite a few tools to get started with as well as laying out her own experiences.

The former is an eclectic selection – it covers the obvious (Scratch and a few commercial toolkits), not-so-obvious (Inform and Twine) and downright awkward (ZZT, which doesn’t even run in modern machines without emulation). The role of programming (and even understanding the basics of the art) is not really described that well (and a golden opportunity for tools like Processing is missed altogether).

As is the latter – the author’s quite keen on highlighting the queer (her word, not mine) agenda of her games thus far. But in quite shallow fashion, she doesn’t describe how she crafted the games, but lays out her biography via them.

The book is short and quickly read.

It provokes the reader in many ways.

And while hardly a real manifesto for changing the industry, it’s definitely a worthy read.

Comboing Reading 2013 and LT75?

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Jan 182013

I’ve been a generally happy, but very passive member of Librarything for years.

Their annual reading challenge nicely coincides with my “list the books that I read”-goal.

But… it’s hosted on their creaky forum, and I don’t really feel like jumping in. And the listing provides nice proper material for this blog that’s been on the anorectic side of meaningful content lately.