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This book has everything - heavy drinking, sex, violence, crime and gambling, all packed into one weekend in a couple of small towns in Taranaki. The characters and writing are colorful, to say the least, and there’s some surprisingly evocative passages about the atmospheric countryside, and portraits of minor characters’ lives. Ronald Hugh Morrieson, a musician, carouser and writer, lived his whole life in Hawera and wrote thinly veiled versions of his fellow Hawerans into his books, making him an unpopular member of the community, even to this day. Hawera took its revenge soon after his death by bulldozing the Morrieson family home and putting up a KFC. Came A Hot Friday is recommended, and I will be tracking down RHM’s other books, quite quickly.

My review of the Motorola Milestone, which appeared in Telecom’s co. magazine.

I have a perfectly good mobile phone. It texts, it emails, it takes photos. I can even ring people. But when I was offered the use of Telecom’s whizzo new Motorola Milestone, running Google’s Android operating system that’s knocked sliced bread off its ‘greatest thing’ perch, I was keen, real keen.

I was out to lunch (so to speak) recently with our Online Response Team, and listened as the guys debated the philosophical and technological differences between the iPhone and Android. Basically, the iPhone is like Steve Job’s famous black turtleneck - warm and comforting, but slightly restrictive, while Android is like a Che Guevara tee-shirt: hip and revolutionary.

But first, a disclaimer: if you want to know how many megarings a phone can omni-vate per quasi-spagbot, read Pat Pilcher on the page opposite. But if you want to know how a grown man can get sucked into farting about on a smartphone when he’s supposed to be supervising his two year old son in the bath, that’s where my tech analysis strengths lie.

I’ve spent many an enjoyable evening swearing loudly at mobile phone manuals, but Android denied me this cathartic pleasure (don’t worry, team, I took my latent anger out on a missing remote control later) by setting up my contacts, email, my gmail accounts and twitter in about ten minutes flat. I was impressed.

The first thing that stuck me was this phone is FAST - the Milestone takes full advantage of XT’s HSPA+ upgrade, so there’s minimal waiting about while your email downloads. You push a button, stuff happens. Easy.
Then, I had a saunter through the Android Market, where you buy ‘apps’ or applications - I chose a Flickr photography app, a few games for the bus and the Kindle e-reader. There’s loads to choose from, and I could see myself loading up like a Harrods boxing day sale.

The web browser was a revelation, working like computer browser you ‘zoom into’ with your fingers to make the text bigger and readable. On Saturday, me and my partner spent twenty minutes or so on the couch surfing websites on the phone - not having to get up and ‘go use the computer’ to use the internet was cool. This was doing stuff together, and it was nice.

Did the Milestone make me more productive? I’ll say yes. Did it make me more popular? I’ll say no. Despite its bulk, weight, a slide out keyboard I found a bit superfluous and voice performance that’s a little… crackly, I thoroughly enjoyed using Android and the Milestone. You’d love it too - take it from a guy that knows next to nothing about phones.

My great uncle Alan, when he left his architecture practise, wanted one thing - this quote from his boss’s wall. He got it. You can click it to make it bigger.

Chad Taylor - Heaven

Again, Chad Taylor puts you right into a fictional Auckland that makes it seem much more dangerous and sexy than the one I live in. Apparently Taylor was doing a long walk along K Road and New North Road every evening when he was writing this, and it feels spot on, right down to the 90s (when the book was written and set) details. The plot meanders along as we get to know the characters, and just wallow in Taylor’s moody Auckland again. Recommended.

Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22

As I wrote to a friend, reading this made me feel I should do less reading novels about self absorbed people and sport books. Hitchens has a big brain, and has been all around the world trying to help the less fortunate. He’d also be great to go drinking with, and one of my favorite bits is the pithy ‘drinking advice’ section. Honestly, I was looking forward to more stories about going drinking with Kingsley and Martin Amis and Clive James, but that’s just me, I’m awfully interested in drinking stories. Recommended.

On Beauty - Zadie Smith

Apparently a homage to Howards End, On Beauty is the story of a washed out English professor, his family, his deadly rival and how it all breaks down deliciously. Its sexier than Smith’s other books, but has the usual lyrical writing you want to nick. Recommended.

The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen

The story of each member of the Lambert family, and the story of their family. Hilarious, touching and close to the bone. Recommended.

The Hours - Micheal Cunningham

A short, dense book with three women going about a single day. A kind of companion novel to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, the stories combine and mirror one another - probably requires a re-read. Recommended.

If this review was AFOTW, it would be 1500 words long and mention books I’d read as a lad, books my uncle read, and books I might read in the future. At 700 pages, you could say this novel is a ramble, and sustaining the tone and pace over that length is challenging, to say the least, says he who’s never attempted writing a novel. AFOTW has some charming and not so charming characters, and a whole lot of earthy Australian humor and turn of phase, which I enjoyed immensely. Toltz wields a metaphor like a man that really knows his way to the loo in the dark (see what I did there?). Unfortunately, I thought large chunks of the text did nothing to drive the plot along, and having just been burnt by A Man In Full, I like a plot that’s driven along. I greatly admire the ambition and humanity in AFOTW, but would have appreciated a thorough edit.

Wikipedia link

I left richardirvine.com in a bit of a undead limbo for a while there, thought I was going to do This Kind Of Thing at Chartered Trips, my tumblelog for a while.

Turns out tumblelogs are great, but they are no blog. I will continue to post shiny pictures over at CT, and blog sporadically here.

As you were.