So, after finishing The Speed of Sound by Thomas Dolby, I returned to The Revolving Door of Life by Alexander McCall Smith. I grabbed this book from the up for grabs book table at my parents' house the week before Thanksgiving. I started this one back in November, read a little, then picked up the Angel of History and then The Speed of Sound, and then came back to this one. I finished it last night, January 14.
I hadn't head of this author before, but I do remember when the movie "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" came out some years back. I didn't see the movie, but that caught my eye when I grabbed this book from the up for grabs table.
So - this book was good, but it was also strange. I think it would be less strange if I read the books in order - it looks like there are 9 books before this one in the series. Regardless, this book was easy to read, and the characters seemed realistic.
This book follows several characters in Scotland who all live in the same neighborhood. Each person / couple live their own life but they intersect periodically with others in the neighborhood. This book focused mainly on Bertie - a young boy whose mother has "accidentally" been taken to a harem in some part of the middle east. His father is left to care for Bertie and his little brother Ulysses. The boys' grandmother comes to help out and we learn that the boys' mother is quite overbearing and a major thorn in Bertie's side. His grandmother changes everything and lets Bertie be the boy he wants to be. The most touching - she takes Bertie to get his very own kilt.
The stories of the people in this book are quite interesting and I found I really wanted to know what happened with all of them. The ending was unremarkable and a little disappointing - it left me wanting more.
Although it took me quite a while to read this book, it was an entertaining and enjoyable read. I would say read the books in order and it will be better than picking up a book in the middle of the series. I think you will get a richer and deeper experience with the characters. My guess is that you'll want to read all of the books in the series.
Now on to my next read - about bunnies! I'm kind of obsessed with animals - you can read more about that on my other blog here.
So, after turning in The Angel of History back in December, I got the next book The Husband requested from the library for me - The Speed of Sound: Breaking the Barriers Between Music and Technology by Thomas Dolby. Yes - THAT Thomas Dolby - as in She Blinded Me with Science. I was listening to NPR on my way home or somewhere and Thomas Dolby was on talking about his new book - The Speed of Sound.
So, if you are anything like me, you know Thomas Dolby as a musician from the 80s. What you don't know is he is so much more than just She Blinded Me with Science. The book starts with a recollection in 1984 where Dolby is hopping off his tour bus in the middle of the Nevada desert to use some fancy not yet widely adopted machine to transmit a song over a pay phone line to none other than Michael Jackson. Yes. Michael Jackson.
Dolby grew up in England and used to work at a grocery / fruit stand. He was very into music at the time, but was barely eking out a living at the grocery store. He eventually got fired from the store and the rest is history - a fascinating, crazy history.
He writes about seeing Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, XTC, Roxy Music, Siouxie and the Banshees, and more all in the very early days of these performers. He started helping a sound guy set up for shows, and eventually graduated to handling sound set up on his own. He longed to be in a band making music. He placed an ad in a local paper and eventually ended up playing with several different local bands - his first was Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club. Eventually, though he had one record deal, but it crashed and burned. He took off for Paris to lick his wounds. While there, he got a call from Mutt Lange asking if he would play with Foreigner on their new album. Off to America he went and worked with them for about a month. Then he worked with a small label that didn't do much for him. Then he happened upon a deal with EMI that was the best he thought he'd get. Sadly for him, the terms of that contract said that EMI owned in perpetuity any and all music he recorded while he was working with them. He ran into bands such as Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, and others during his time with EMI.
He writes about his journey in creating more music, dabbling in music videos (and directing them), meeting Michael Jackson, who really liked She Blinded Me with Science, and gave Dolby his phone number in Los Angeles. He details how on a trip to America, he came down with mono, played a live set on Richard Blade's (of KROQ fame) show, ended up in a limo with record execs and not wanting to go out with them, so called the only person he knew in LA - Michael Jackson. And guess what - Dolby went to Jackson's house and hung out with him for a while.
The music portion of the book is full of crazy tales of encounters and time spent with a ton of very famous people. In 1985 he performed on the Grammys with Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, and Howard Jones. He was hired to produce songs for Joni Mitchell in 1985 (and was fired by her that same year), played with David Bowie for Live Aid at Wembley Stadium. I could go on and on about his music experiences - if you want to know more, read the book.
But where I was blown away was learning about how Dolby eventually made his way to Silicon Valley, founded a company called Headspace (then Beatnik), was almost in on the tech IPO fever, but didn't quite make it. Dolby's goal was to sound-ify this new thing called the internet by using the RMF digital music format he created. He had a big deal with Netscape that crashed and burned. Sadly for Dolby (there's a lot of "sadly for Dolby" in his book), his dream to sound-ify the internet didn't immediately catch on. He moved on to other ways to use sound for things, and eventually changed the way these new devices called mobile phones rang. He worked with Nokia to change their ringtone and invented their tell-tale tone (listen here). He played poker with Chris Anderson (who created the TED conference), the San Francisco chef (Howard Bulka) who founded Howie's Artisan Pizza, and Rob Reid (of RealNetworks).
This book is full of revelations (at least to me) about Thomas Dolby - the musician, the tech geek, the entrepreneur, the CEO. Ultimately, his main interest was music and sound and how to create and invent new and interesting ways to play and hear sound. He was in Serra Monte mall in Daly City (I've been to this mall - in the range of malls, it is one of the more janky malls) and he had an epiphany - some girl's phone ringtone blurted out a song by Eminem. Dolby's epiphany was - RINGTONES - that was where he could do something. Downloadable ringtones (for a fee, of course) playable through the software he created at his company, Beatnik. Nokia was onboard, but with a nonexclusive license to Beatnik. Soon, Samsung, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, and Panasonic were using his software and paying a royalty. And chipmakers got in on this and licensed code to embed in their chips.
After resigning from Beatnik, Dolby founded another company called Retro Ringtones and made deals with mobile carriers to create new ringtones from Top 40 chart hits and feed them to the carriers' mobile portals for users to download (for a fee, of course).
Now, Dolby the musician, the entrepreneur, the techy nerd, the husband, the father, the inventor is a professor and spends "eight months a year in Baltimore, Maryland, where I am teaching my students some of the things I've learned in a lifetime of breaking the sound barrier."
This book was AMAZING. Unlike Angel of History - this was a quick read, had grammar, punctuation, structure, and made sense. I started it on 12/24 and finished it on 1/3. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes music or has experience in Silicon Valley, the tech industry, the dot-com-boom, the dot-com-bust, or is just curious about why they can play a song on their cell phone. Two enthusiastic thumbs up from me.
