CalTrain MediaFest: Special Near-Xmas Edition

While work has been getting somewhat horrendously busy, my Caltrain time still allows me to do a little light reading and video game playing. So here's a few of the more intriguing trifles I've been checking out, of late (missing 3 or 4 other books that I already returned, oops):

'Hollywood Causes Cancer' by Tom Green - if you've read this blog, you may realize that I'm rather a major fan of Tom Green, and yes, that even includes Freddy Got Fingered. Although he wasn't necessarily the smoothest interviewer in the world, even his MTV talk show was intermittently genius, his joyful embrace of the surreal is borderline Python-esque, and this autobiography explains it all, from the Canadian beginnings to the ill-fated Barrymore marriage. It's tart, and puppyishly honest, but it doesn't really tell us where Tom, the gonzo Harold Lloyd of his generation, will surface next.



'The Murder Room' by PD James - although in her eighties, James continues to produce outstanding, higher-echelon detective fiction, and this latest Adam Dalgleish mystery, focusing on a struggling private museum in London and the dignified, quiet English lives there-in ripped apart by murder, is spectacularly evocative and densely plotted. James' books are, most of all, character studies, and this is another impeccable study in mystery, motive, and resolution.



'Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls' by Square Enix (Game Boy Advance) - since I was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, then Commodore Amiga kid, growing up in the UK, I didn't have a NES, and so didn't play the initial Final Fantasy games. But I'd forgotten how much of an enthusiast I was for simple, level grind heavy turn-based RPG action. And heck, if I liked Biomotor Unitron on the Neo Geo Pocket Color for the same reasons, you can be damn sure that I'd like these progenitors, here in their NGPC-enhanced state - much better than Golden Sun, my other Game Boy Advance RPG purchase thus far.



'Sojourner: An Insider's View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission' by Andrew Mishkin - this fascinating book follows the development of the Sojourner rover, which, on a 'micro-budget' of $25 million, albeit built on previous Jet Propulsion Lab concepts, was a tremendous success after the Pathfinder probe landed on Mars itself in July 1997. It's not afraid to talk about the problems, the software bugs (even potentially catastrophic ones, such as Mars time set wrong, which was only found accidentally in a simulator!), and the setbacks, as well as the amazing successes of the mission, whose spiritual successors have been trucking very happily around Mars recently. Damned cool.