Z/Web

Author: Lee Goldberg

While I’m a huge fan of Goldberg’s Monk books, this one has too little mystery and too much exposition. The problem is that to get the paranoid Monk to Germany is no easy task — and we, the reader, have to sit through every tedious minute of him traveling, freaking out at foreign stuff, etc. It gets tiresome and old after just a few pages, and yet that’s most of the novel. Yes, he does solve a few murders, but they are few and far between. I don’t know if the series is running out of steam, but I’d like to see a lot more mystery solving and less “Monk is weird” stuff. While extremely well-written, it’s just not that interesting.

An interesting documentary on the “cult of Macintosh,” the crazy fans who love Apple’s computers. I’m not sure if this would appeal to non-fans; in a limited way it attempts to explain them, but doesn’t go far enough to make this a sociologically valuable piece of research. Instead, this is mostly going to appeal to Mac fans as a way to show that they are not alone in their insanity (it proves there are other, crazier people out there). The film basically interviews a wide variety of Mac fans, but the interviews aren’t too much more than “I love Macs” or journalists giving brief computing history lessons. In other words, there’s not much new here (unless you don’t know the history). It’s still a fun journey for Mac fans, and it is interesting (but probably only once). It might actually be more valuable many years from now as a really neat look back at 2007 (a lot was filmed at Macworld Expo 2007 when the iPhone was first announced). Already Apple’s position in the global market has increased dramatically from then and if the trend continues and in a decade Apple is bigger than Microsoft, this would be a fascinating look back at a time when Apple wasn’t so popular. Worth seeing if you’re a MacHead.