Dave Snowdon

I hadn’t heard anything about District 9 apart from it involved aliens on Earth before watching it but I’m pleased that I succumbed to the impulse to watch the film.

Olympus have recently launched a new camera called the E-P1 or PEN - it’s a digital version of the original PEN which was released in 1959. It’s somewhere between a compact and a DSLR - like an SLR it’s possible to change lenses but there is no view finder so you use it more like a compact.

Ghene Snowdon had an E-P1 to review and I was able to prise it away from her for a day or so and form my own impressions.

The main ideas behind the book can be summed up pretty simply:

• Life is too short to spend doing something you don’t like
• Why wait until retirement to do something more enjoyable?

Tim’s method for enabling you to have a more fulfilling life is basically:

I read this book shortly after finishing "God is not great" by Christopher Hitchens and the two books make an interesting pair. I found it fascinating to compare each’s arguments and also the respective styles in which the books are written.

I enjoyed reading this book - Hitchens does reasonable job of debunking some of the major tenets of the major religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. He is pretty even handed they all get a pounding.

I actually read the French version of this book (the French version is titled "Sultana") but I guess the English version should be pretty much the same - in any case I’ve put French and English links below.

If bigotry, racism, cruelty, hypocrisy and shear human stupidity make you angry then this book is likely to leave you feeling furious that such injustice is allowed to exist in the world. Saudi Arabian society, as described in this book, seems to have cruelty and misogyny as its founding principles.

It was thanks to the film that I discovered the graphic novel. I’m not normally into graphic novels and so I hadn’t heard of Watchmen until I saw the trailer a few months ago.

The Reader is not a film about redemption, nor forgiveness perhaps not even understanding. It is a film, I think, about shame, regret, love and the times that love is not enough to stop us from hurting those we love or enough to make us give the comfort the loved one seeks. It is a sad film, an emotional film, the sort of film that makes us wonder why and that is perhaps the best kind of film there is.

The premise of this book is that otherwise good (or at least not actively bad) people can do bad, indeed evil things and that this can be explained by the situation in which the acts took place.

I stumbled on the DVD of this film while aimlessly browsing the racks of DVDs in a local DVD store and was intrigued by the blurb on the back of the box - perhaps because of what it does not say as much as what it does.