“Not Super, But Good”
Score: 4/5

The House Of Silk

Anthony Horowitz

£3.86

I like Sherlock Holmes. I remember reading the old Holmes stories when I was younger, and wondering what a hansom cab was and why strange things were ‘singular’. I learned a lot from those old stories…

So what we have here is an attempt to write a new Sherlock Holmes story. Not a story featuring Holmes in current times (like Sherlock), not a story translated to current times and moved 3000 miles across the Atlantic (like Elementary), not a re-imagining of the ‘Holmes franchise’ (like the recent films Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows), just a real honest to goodness Holmes tale the way they used to be.

It mostly succeeds.

What I liked about Holmes was that the clues were there. You could – if you were smart enough – usually figure out some of the clues and see the puzzles for what they were. It was often hard, but that’s what made it interesting. Holmes was clever – clever enough to see beyond the plain facts – and much more observant than I’ll ever be.

I never felt smarter than Holmes. He was always further ahead, seeing more, understanding more.

Here’s a book where I think the author was genuinely trying to recapture that. I figured out more about the ending than I’d expected, and more than I’d hoped, so maybe some of the clues were telegraphed too much. Maybe I’m just older and more cynical about the writers’ craft these days. (Some crime shows go through a very obvious phase of “the killer is whoever the best known guest star is this week”.)

But overall it’s a fun book, and if you like the old Holmes stories you may well like this too.

“Pseudo Intellectual Clap Trap”
Score: 2/5

Life Of Pi

Yann Martel

£3.85

Didn’t really enjoy this at all. It just seemed the author was determined to show how clever he was, rather than tell a good yarn. Meh.

“Decent, Aged, Sci-Fi Pulp”
Score: 3/5

Time Mercenaries

Philip E. High

£3.52

I’m not sure how this ended up in my purchases – someone, somewhere must have mentioned it – but I got an old secondhand copy.

It’s not bad. The plot feels very similar to the Destroyermen series of books – a boat and naval crew from current-ish times travels to a very different world and has to fight. In this case it’s a Royal Navy submarine instead of a World War 2-era US destroyer, but the similarities are quite strong.

The major difference is the sheer compression of the story. Where I read 3 of the books in the Destroyermen series, this book packs the whole story into one slimmer volume.

This means the book doesn’t spend too much time on characterisation, but I don’t remember the Destroyermen series having particularly deep characters either. There are far fewer parenthetical issues in this book though.

No bad thing – it was a decent story that was quickly read.

“State Of The Makers”
Score: 5/5

Makers

Chris Anderson

£12.80

I don’t think this book will date well (so much for the Long Tail), but as a documenting of the current state of the Maker community it’s excellent. Very readable, and covers a lot of categories. I’m watching 3D printing, but this book covers much more than that.

I’ve already bought a couple of copies of this book for friends.

“Not Bad, But Long”
Score: 3/5

Stand On Zanzibar

John Brunner

£7.19

I found this book very hard to get through. Given that I finished The Information Diet in September and have read no other books in the meantime, that’s a good few months where I could have been reading something else.

It’s not that this is a bad book – it’s good enough. I appreciate that he’s trying to push boundaries in the way the narrative unfolds, and I know that this book was written quite a while ago (1968, although it’s set in 2010). And it is interesting to see what someone in 1968 thought 2010 would be like. But I never really warmed to the style of narrative, and that meant I didn’t pick it up as often as I would have otherwise, and…

I’ve lived with the ZVOX 420 for over 6 months now, and overall it has been a bit disappointing. I’d tried a few other approaches to fixing the awful sound on my new TV, but ZVOX had the promise of ‘Great Sound Made Simple’ so I had one shipped all the way from the US.

Turns out it’s not so simple after all. I thought I’d share my thoughts. This isn’t a review of the product, more a complaint about how annoying it is.

I have an Intelliplug, which turns on the power to most of my video devices when the TV is turned on. It’s a great idea. Turning things on is really easy – one press of the TV power button on the remote turns on the power, another press of the same button turns on the TV and you’re up and running. None of the humming, glowing, whirring beasts are taking power or costing money when the TV is off.

The ZVOX 420 doesn’t like it.

The ZVOX 420 doesn’t like being turned off.

When the power comes on, the ZVOX 420 takes a huff and turns itself off. It even tells you on its digital readout ‘OFF’.

Even now I’m amazed that someone thought that turning ON the power should be a sign that the unit should switch itself OFF. It’s not something that’s accidental, it’s not an oversight, someone has deliberately programmed this thing so that when power is restored to the unit it shows ‘OFF’ on the display and powers down. It’s like someone decided it should say “Hey, great! We have power now! Let's switch ourselves off!”

It would get worse if I followed ZVOX's support advice of leaving it powered on all the time and have it learn the TV remote’s power on/off code. Then we’d be in the following loop:

1. Intelliplug off, TV off, ZVOX off.
2. Press TV remote power button.
3. Intelliplug on, TV off, ZVOX on.
4. Press TV remote power button again.
5. Intelliplug on, TV on, ZVOX off.
6. Press TV remote power button.
7. Intelliplug on, TV off, ZVOX on.
8. Press TV remote power button again.
9. Intelliplug on, TV on, ZVOX off.
10. …

Pressing the power button on the remote just repeats steps 2-5. Either the TV is on, or the ZVOX is on, but never both. (This cycle of only-one-but-never-both is much less fun than it sounds.)

I didn’t follow that advice. Nor did I choose to use the horrible little remote that came with the unit.

In the end I settled for having the ZVOX plugged in to the Intelliplug, and using the TV remote to turn it on and off. That does mean a delay of a few seconds every time I turn the TV on, while I wait for the ZVOX to gleefully insist on turning itself off and (only once it has finished) become responsive to the ON signal. And that’s annoying.

Every single time I turn on my TV, I’m annoyed at the ZVOX 420.

There are some nice bits to the ZVOX unit. I like that the display turns itself off after a few seconds, so there are no bright LEDs in your vision when you’re watching something dark on the TV. I wish more companies did that – I’ve taken to putting black tape over the pointless LEDs on some products.

The sound is OK, too. I’m not an audiophile and I was deliberately choosing not to go for a 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound system, but the sound is fine, and much, much better than the TV on its own. There is sometimes some distortion when I’m playing things through the Boxee, but that may be due to the Boxee rather than the ZVOX.

But overall I’m just disappointed. Every time I turn on the TV I have to stop, pause, curse the stupidity of whoever thought turning OFF the moment it got power was a good idea, then turn the ZVOX on.

Every. Single. Time.

I did email support at ZVOX, and they said the deliberate turning-off-when-power-comes-on is to ensure compliance with ‘surprisingly varied safety and power consumption regulations imposed on a product available worldwide’, and told me how little power it draws when it’s in standby.

I don’t care what the product does in other countries, or other houses. I just know what I want it to do in my house. I want it to turn on when I turn it on, not turn off when I turn it on. And it makes little difference to me how little power it draws in standby when I never want it to be in standby at all. I just want it to turn on and off properly.

“Short, Readable But Worrying”
Score: 4/5

The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption

Clay A. Johnson

£12.25

Every so often I get a bit worried about my Twitter addiction. Then I take a break for a week and try to figure out the bits I’ve missed and the bits I haven’t, and see if I need to cut down my usage.

This has been much easier lately. Twitter’s new policies on API usage have taken the shine off it all for me, so lately my usage has been fairly pedestrian. Ah well, so it goes.

Still, the notion of Twitter-holidays or Google+ diet resonate a bit with me. I do check Twitter and email fairly often, but I can tell when I’m really concentrating because reading the latest status updates doesn’t even occur to me. So maybe my concentration would be better if I eschewed distractions entirely while I was trying to get things done?

This book covers that question and a few others. There is much about US politics, and how organisations like Fox News and Huffington Post have moved from being news organisations to ‘affirmation distributors’ – you don’t go to them to learn, you go to them to be told you’re right. This is disturbing, and it’s probably not too healthy for all their users/viewers. But there are also recommendations, such as seeking out primary sources instead of secondary news reports.

I do like the idea of going to primary sources. Sometimes the primary source for a story (like a health study) can be a bit impenetrable, but it may be worth persevering with it rather than trusting a low-paid writer to interpret it for you. (This book does show how some of these low-paid writers have to work – let’s just say they don’t get a lot of time for introspecting on each story before publication.)

Sometimes it feels like the eating metaphor is a bit stretched, but nonetheless it’s still a worthwhile book to read if you care about the information that is demanding your attention every day.

“Brain Twisting Good Fun”
Score: 3/5

The Little Schemer

Daniel P Friedman

£20.19

I’m continuing my playing around with Scheme, so I re-read this book. I honestly don’t know quite what to say about it. On one hand, it’s a primer that introduces the Scheme language through a series of questions and answers. On the other hand, in its 200 pages it takes you all the way up to Y-combinators and a simple Scheme-like interpreter.

Parts of it make it appear as an easy book, but I found some sections quite brain-melting. I’m not sure if that’s a reflection of the book or of me though.

“Radical Democracy And Battles!”
Score: 4/5

New Model Army

Adam Roberts

£9.09

Yeah, another 4/5. That’s four in a row. I have enjoyed these books though, so I’m happy at the decent run of good books I’ve just had. On the other hand, none of them have quite edged into the exceptional 5/5 territory that Nick Harkaway is in. (I still wish he’d write more.)

This is a thoughtful book, an interesting take on the future – the future of armies, the future of countries.

“More Changes, More Growing”
Score: 4/5

Ghost Story: A Dresden Files novel

Jim Butcher

£5.89

That’s 3 books in a row that have got 4/5, which is pretty good going for me. I try to be a bit choosy with books I buy, so while I use 3/5 to describe ‘average’, it’s the average quality of books I’ve been choosy enough to spend money on rather than the average of what’s out there.

I’m back to enjoying these Dresden novels. For a while they seemed a bit same-y, but now the differences at the end of each novel really are making a difference to the next one. The story grows a bit, and changes.