The Ramblings of Octavo

Yes, it’s book review time again. First up is Mental Floss’s forbidden knowledge. An excellent coffee table book or if you just fancy a bit of historical trivia. The book is divided up into 7 chapters (one for each of the 7 deadly sins) and within each chapter, events and anecdotes are further divided into groups. For example, under Sloth there is a group with anecdotes about several kings who let their mistresses rule the country. For the most part the book is pretty interesting and funny, although there is a heavy american bias (as if the authors never knew that the book would be released to a wider audience) which always annoys me. In conclusion, it’s a reasonably good coffee table book - I’d give it 7 out of 10.

Next up is the De Villiers Code - you’ll notice it’s not on the sidebar, because it’s a local (South African) book, so naturally Amazon doesn’t carry it. The bastards. Anyway - this is probably the funniest book I’ve ever read and it’s a pity it’s not getting more exposure. Tom Eaton has done a masterful job with this spoof and leaves Dan Brown in shreds. I bought this book on impulse after reading the first page in the bookstore - it had me giggling uncontrollably with mirth. Even the blurb is funny:

A brutal murder. A masochistic killer. An ancient secret. A beautiful policewoman. Lots of short sentences. When C.C. Langa – Nobel Prize winner, physicist, symbologist, love-god - is called to investigate a mysterious killing in the National Gallery in Cape Town, he finds himself the primary target in a dark plot that will change the course of history forever. Or at least change the course of history until the next time the course of history is changed. Perhaps in the sequel…….. Are there secrets worth killing for? Can Langa discover the shattering truth? How many roads must a man walk down before he can say he’s a man? Why do blurbs always ask rhetorical questions?

If you see this book - BUY IT. I guarentee that you will laugh out loud, even if you never do when reading books. Even if you haven’t read the Da Vinci Code (as I haven’t) it’s still hilarious. And if you have (as Ibis have) it’ll have you in stitches permanently. 10 out of 10!

I’ve recently re-read one of my all-time favourite series of books! Daughter of the Empire, Servant of the Empire and Mistress of the Empire are three parts in the Empire series by Raymond Feist and Janny Wurts.

These books are some of the best fantasy ever written in my opinion. Although perfectly readable as a standalone series, it helps a great deal if you have read Feist’s Riftwar Saga (Magacian, Silverthorn, Darkness at Sethanon) as the two series’ happen are more or less the same time (although on different planets) and the Riftwar will give you a good backstory/alternate view of the events detailed in the Empire series.

Rather than rely on the usual magic and knights hacking each other to death (which is the staple of fantasy), the Empire series follows the story of a young girl who leads her house to greatness, by guile, political intrigue, spying and plotting. The books do an amazing job of painting a very human woman who is forced by circumstance to assume a role that she both relishes and is disturbed by. Her political plots occasionally have consequences that shock and wound her, yet she soldiers on.

 All in all, it’s a great series and I seriously recommend it to any fan of the fantasy genre!

I also recently finished reading Google Story by David Vise. I don’t really have terribly much to say about it really. I’d say that for the casual reader, they may be a bit dissappointed by this book’s lack of depth. For Google fan’s there’s nothing here you probably don’t already know.

The book, does a poor job of revealing the two most important people behind google, Brin and Page. It reveals only the most basic biographical information and a few fairly obvious character traits, but doesn’t give you an inside feel for them as people at all. It doesn’t give you terribly much inside information about Google either besides the basics.

The book does what it says really. It charts Google’s begginings and it’s rise to its present position as a global mega-corp and the king of search. It doesn’t do much else though.

I recently finished reading “The Sword of Truth” by Terry Goodkind.

DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. I read a short story by Terry Goodkind in a compilation book I have (Legends II) which was pretty good, so I thought I’d try the full novel out. MISTAKE. This book is about as cliched and obvious as fantasy novels come - which if you read fantasy, is pretty bad. The author goes ON AND ON, describing the same thing in several different ways, so that a description or conversation that should only take three lines, ends up being two pages of drivel. The ending is wholly predicable from about 1/3 of the way in and the author keeps coming up with “extra” abilities to save the hero’s JUST in time.

He uses 1 line consistantly to describe the heroine’s power: “There was an impact to the air; thunder without sound”. EVERY SINGLE TIME. Unvarying and with no other description. It just gets annoying after a while. 

Finally and most damning, this book is just plain disturbing in its descriptions of violence. Most fantasy books have some measure of gore in them, but it’s usually appropriate. Goodkind seems to take some perverse pleasure in describing each battle in the most vivid, gory detail possible. Some scenes made my physically ill, just reading them. In one particular scene, a 6 year old girl gets killed in a particularly gross manner. Say no more.

Whatever you do, DO NOT read this book and certainly DO NOT allow anyone under 18 to read it. The graphic descriptions of violence are pretty gruesome. I’m not kidding.

Lots of news, but no time to type it all!

The move into our new flat was long and tiring, but it’s over thankfully. Ibis and I spent most of the week unpacking boxes slowly and getting the house the way we want it. This weekend we did quite a bit of shopping for the new place and generally set the place up the way we like it.

we had intended to get started on a custom built table for the lounge this weekend, but my grandmother suffered two sudden heartattacks on Friday and so we took some flowers and visited the family instead. It was touch and go for a while, but it looks like she’s on the mend.

I finished reading First King of Shannara by Terry Brooks on Sunday. It’s a prequel to his Shannara saga and I would definitely only recommend it to die-hard fans who have read the whole series and are desperate for a bit more backstory. The book itself is slow at times and not particularly interesting on its own. It could have been explored in much greater detail if Brooks had decided to and one almost gets the feeling that he rushed through this book a bit - as if it was something of a burden that he just wanted over as quickly as possible.

This all means that I’ve just started reading Google Story by David Vise. This book is basically an ode to Google and its two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I’m somewhere on chapter 3 at the moment and although it’s interesting to read, it does get a bit old the way the author keeps going on in glowing terms about how amazingly talented both Page and Brin are. I’m hoping he digs up a bit of dirt later on to make these two seemingly perfect geniuses a bit more human.

I have tons more news, but no time to type it so I’ll leave it here for now

Oh, one last thing - we’ve ordered HomeDSL from Telkom and been given a lead time of 3 weeks, so Ibis will be offline for a couple more weeks at least Damn Telkom