I bought The Fifth Vial to read on a plane ride. It is a medical conspiracy/suspense novel. It suffers from a few problems.

First, it could use a lot of trimming; I often lost interest when the author sidetracked into lengthy scenarios that did little to advance the plot or meaningfully develop characters. A suspense novel should carry you along, and this one did not do the trick for me. Second, the premise is so implausible, the conspiracy so broad, that it is just too unbelievable. This is another reason that the novel kept failing to engage me; I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief. Finally, I found most of the characters to be composed of cardboard. The bad guys were like cartoons who would snarl and sneer. The only character that interested me was Natalie Reyes, who was fleshed out in a rather reasonable fashion for the starring role in a suspense novel (by this I mean to say that suspense novels are not exactly well known for interesting characterizations).

Admittedly, I have a lot of stuff going on in my life now, so I’m probably a hard case when it comes to being distractible. If you like the suspense novels of Dan Brown, you might like this. But it’s nowhere near the quality of The Da Vinci Code. It’s more along the lines of Digital Fortress, which suffers from similar problems.

I should mention that it is well worth reading the “Author’s Note” which starts on p 501. Please, if you haven’t already, consider signing up as an organ donor.

I am not sure why this book is a “cult favorite.” Yes, it is mildly funny. But the target of its humor – modern life in all of its absurdities and shallowness – is a bit too obvious by now, and has been done to death; this book doesn’t add much verve to the backlash. The story’s saving grace is that it was quirky and short enough not to grate on my patience.

Does anyone else get the feeling that the author was hoping to get his book picked up by Hollywood with the inconsistent, tacked-on, falsely upbeat last chapter? Or are we supposed to interpret it as a meta-symptom of our shallow culture?

The cover of How I Became Stupid declares it an “International Cult Favorite”! Who can resist?

I agree with the poster who says that Influencer is poorly organized. It also comes off as a promotional tool, with references and links to the authors’ web site.

On the other hand, reading the anecdotes is entertaining at least, and there is clearly some value to the advice offered… although I heard some of it before, from various other sources.

I wouldn’t recommend paying full price for the book. Take a look at the reviews on Amazon, and then check it out from the library if you feel it’s worth the read.

Crossing to Safety is the story of the friendship between two couples, focusing primarily on the academic struggles of the husbands, and the health troubles of the wives. The book did not resonate with me, and I found the portraits sometimes shallow. In particular, Charity, one of the wives, is so overbearing that the book is rather unpleasantly overwhelmed by her personality. I kept wanting to hear about the other characters, but then there’d come another earful about some controlling action by Charity. I sometimes felt that I was sitting in the narrator’s kitchen, listening to him vent about yet another egregious episode perpetrated by his friend’s wife. The book is only saved by rising above these petty details to deal with the subject of death in an poignant way; at least it got some tears from me, although I may be an easy mark.

On a side note, I also liked the fact that Stegner delved into certain mundane life issues, like financial difficulties, and surviving in academia. One of the characters is quite wealthy, and we get a different take on the whole Friends with Money situation.

This is the first book that I’ve read by Wallace Stegner. Apparently it was his last novel. I’d be willing to try something else by him, if only for comparison.

Perhaps I am a philistine in this matter, but I am not a fan of Jeanne Moreau. I am almost embarrassed to admit it. True, I haven’t seen much of her stuff. I have seen Jules et Jim, a movie which did little for me – and I just don’t get the attraction.

The movie The Old Woman Who Walked in the Sea does nothing to change my mind. Poorly executed, acted, scripted, directed, and filmed – there is nothing that I liked about this film!

I will continue to sample Moreau’s oeuvre, however, in the hopes of discovering the charm in her talent. Michel Serrault doesn’t come off very well in this movie, either, and I know from previous experience (Rien ne va plus, The Girl from Paris) that he can be quite a good actor.

If you want to see a good French film themed around a con artist, take a look at Isabelle Huppert in The Swindle (Rien ne va plus). Caveat: I am a big fan of Huppert, and can’t get enough of her.

The book is great so far. I love Robert Reich’s self-deprecating humor. Here’s an excerpt from February 7, 1993. Reich, man of the people, has just closed the executive dining room. The well-meaning intent is that “This is a Democratic administration. We eat with the workers. We wait in line with the workers.” So there he is, standing on line to pay the cashier in the cafeteria, along with everyone else:

Ten minutes later, still standing in line, I feel my egalitarian zeal beginning to wane….

The line creeps forward. What if the President of the United States is trying to reach me? “I’m sorry, Mr. President, the Secretary can’t come to the phone right now. He’s in the cafeteria. Been waiting in the cashier line for twenty minutes.”

While on line, the woman in front of him strikes up a conversation with him, failing to recognize that he’s the new Secretary of Labor. Really fun stuff! I wish I’d been there.

I’m at a friend’s house, and picked up Robert Reich’s Locked in the Cabinet, buried amongst a ton of other books here. I enjoyed his book I’ll Be Short, so I’m giving this a try. Interesting, so far.

I found about the first hundred pages of Microserfs amusing, and then it was more of the same, and more of the same, and yet more of the same. I do not know what the entire middle of the book was for. Perhaps for character development; but the characters never struck me as anything more than cardboard (perhaps they were just too realistically boring). The twist at the end was good, but after being bored for a couple hundred pages, I was just glad to be done with this.

I probably would have actually enjoyed this book, with some heavy editing.

Code Complete, on the subject of measuring performance, from Chapter 25, page 604:

Whether you use someone else’s tool or write your own code to make the measurements, make sure that you’re measuring only the execution time of the code you’re tuning. Use the number of CPU clock ticks allocated to your program rather than the time of day. Otherwise, when the system switches from your program to another program, one of your routines will be penalized for the time spent executing another program.