I'm spreading in Shannon's book meme. (Which was spread from somewhere else, and somewhere else before that, and so on, as all good memes are.)
The rules!
Copy the list of books, then bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.
Here goes (with occasional commentary)...
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (I could swear I bought it, but I can't find it. I am ashamed.)
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre (The first pop quiz I ever had came when we were reading this book my freshman year in high school. I actually hadn't read the chapter yet (le gasp), but somehow I managed to squeak out a passing grade.)
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife (Loved, loved, loved it.)
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner (I keep intending to read this.)
Mrs. Dalloway (Read it for school and loved it. It gets a bolding.)
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a Memoir in Books (No, I don't know why I haven't read it yet, either.)
Memoirs of a Geisha (At an airport flying home, had given away whatever ARC I was reading to a bookseller I was visiting. The magazine stand had a bunch of meh paperbacks and this. I almost missed the call to board my flight, I was so entranced.)
Middlesex (No, but I have read The Virgin Suicides and loved it. Middlesex is on the list to buy.)
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel (I expected to hate it - I did my honors thesis on vampire literature (the English department collectively /facepalmed, I'm sure), so it takes a lot to impress me. Then I found out Kostova did ten years of research for this book. I loved it. I wouldn't shut up about it the whole summer.)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Y'know... I didn't hate it.)
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
Anansi Boys
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels and Demons (I want those hours back, plzkthx)
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon (So, uh. My friend Eric has been recommending this forever, but when I was wandering the bookstore trying to remember which book he'd raved about, I got confused and thought he'd been talking about Neuromancer (hey, airport bookstore, 6:00 AM, no coffee. My brain wasn't on.) I loved Neuromancer. Now I need to go get Cryptonomicon.
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Spent the whole book nodding. I would have shouted "Amen!" every few lines, but I read most of it on the train. People tend to look at you funny when you do that.)
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
---
There are a lot of books on this list I'd still like to get around to. I'm kind of sad more of them aren't highlighted, but somehow the teachers and professors I had in high school and college deviated wildly from the lists of standard assigned reading. I can't complain, but the list feels light.
Of course, my genres-of-preference, sf/f and horror, don't have a lot of entries on the list unless the books are hugely successful. Hmph.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Brief Interruption of Service
It's been a while since I've rambled at you. I've fallen a bit behind on industry news, and I spent most of last weekend doing family things and planting herbs, so there wasn't a lot of time to catch up on my reading. I've also been bitten by a writing bug, so while that's a good thing for me, it's made this blog a lonely place.
Unless there's a way to plug the eReader directly into my brain, I am going to be reviewless this week.
Back Tuesday with more yattering about bookish things. Until then, I might spill words onto screen over at the other blog. Come visit!
Unless there's a way to plug the eReader directly into my brain, I am going to be reviewless this week.
Back Tuesday with more yattering about bookish things. Until then, I might spill words onto screen over at the other blog. Come visit!
Monday, May 19, 2008
Technology and Me, a Love-Hate Relationship
There was no review on Friday because the internet gods decided I didn't need to be connected to the outside world for the day. However, I have sweet, sweet connectivity now. Rejoice!
Also, I believe my Sony Reader might be fried, somehow. It had about half-battery on Thursday. I didn't touch it all weekend. Then, this morning, while I was waiting for the train to arrive, I pulled it out of my purse and tried turning it on.
Nothing.
Assuming that, somehow, the battery simply ran out, I plugged it into my computer when I arrived at work.
Nothing.
No icon letting me know that it's charging, no acknowledgment that something is plugged into the USB port on my computer. I haven't the faintest idea what might have killed it this dead, but it's not responding to anything.
Yet another argument for why paper books will always, always trump these devices. Right now, it seems to me, I have a $300 lump of metal and plastic and parts with no entertainment value whatsoever.
Also, I believe my Sony Reader might be fried, somehow. It had about half-battery on Thursday. I didn't touch it all weekend. Then, this morning, while I was waiting for the train to arrive, I pulled it out of my purse and tried turning it on.
Nothing.
Assuming that, somehow, the battery simply ran out, I plugged it into my computer when I arrived at work.
Nothing.
No icon letting me know that it's charging, no acknowledgment that something is plugged into the USB port on my computer. I haven't the faintest idea what might have killed it this dead, but it's not responding to anything.
Yet another argument for why paper books will always, always trump these devices. Right now, it seems to me, I have a $300 lump of metal and plastic and parts with no entertainment value whatsoever.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Tuesday Musing: Customer Service as a Value-Add
Yesterday, I heard an advertisement on NPR for a local realtor. The ad promised "exceptional customer service." I couldn't tell you the name of the company or what other things they might have offered, because I was so instantly caught up in that phrase.
It's something I see and hear in a lot of ads these days, this promise to be nice to customers, to be helpful and knowledgable and to, generally, not suck.
It floors me.
Exceptional customer service is something that should be understood. A business shouldn't have to promise that they'll do these things; they should just do them. Every person who walks through your door should be treated with respect. You go above and beyond for every. single. customer, whether they're buying $500 worth of merchandise or spending fifty cents on a newspaper.
Does that mean falling all over yourself and fawning on the customers? No, of course not. Then you're being disingenuous.
But a smile and a hello go a long way, as does knowing when to offer help and when to let the person browse in peace.
I can't wrap my head around why so many businesses these days toot their own horns about how great they are to their customers. Some of it, perhaps, is to suggest that the competition falls flat in that area. But it also sounds a bit like maybe that particular company wasn't doing so well on the service side before and has refocused. It serves to make me less confident about doing business with them, rather than more.
Should a commitment to great service be part of a company's mission statement? Certainly. However, it's an internal thing. Trumpeting the fact that you're good to your customers to the public sounds the same to me as the supermarket promising it will carry food.
Exceptional customer service should be a given. If you have to tell people you're going to provide it, you're doing it wrong. Shut up and do it. Let your actions speak for themselves.
It's something I see and hear in a lot of ads these days, this promise to be nice to customers, to be helpful and knowledgable and to, generally, not suck.
It floors me.
Exceptional customer service is something that should be understood. A business shouldn't have to promise that they'll do these things; they should just do them. Every person who walks through your door should be treated with respect. You go above and beyond for every. single. customer, whether they're buying $500 worth of merchandise or spending fifty cents on a newspaper.
Does that mean falling all over yourself and fawning on the customers? No, of course not. Then you're being disingenuous.
But a smile and a hello go a long way, as does knowing when to offer help and when to let the person browse in peace.
I can't wrap my head around why so many businesses these days toot their own horns about how great they are to their customers. Some of it, perhaps, is to suggest that the competition falls flat in that area. But it also sounds a bit like maybe that particular company wasn't doing so well on the service side before and has refocused. It serves to make me less confident about doing business with them, rather than more.
Should a commitment to great service be part of a company's mission statement? Certainly. However, it's an internal thing. Trumpeting the fact that you're good to your customers to the public sounds the same to me as the supermarket promising it will carry food.
Exceptional customer service should be a given. If you have to tell people you're going to provide it, you're doing it wrong. Shut up and do it. Let your actions speak for themselves.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Review: Cory Doctorow's Little Brother
I hinted a bit about how today's pick was an author who didn't agree with the whole DRM thing. It's more than that. This book, like all of his books, was released under a Creative Commons license. Go look it up; it's a really interesting idea.
The author in question is Cory Doctorow, whom you might also know as the co-editor of Boing Boing.
I have so many things to say about his new YA book, Little Brother, that I'm not even sure where to begin. I suppose the best place is with a synopsis. So!
Marcus Yallow, a high school senior in San Fransciso, ditches school with three of his friends to play an Alternate Reality Game. While they're tracking down a clue, terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge. Marcus and his friends are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and find themselves taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security.
When they're released - after several days of cruel interrogation - Marcus realizes how many of the freedoms he'd taken for granted are now being taken away under the guise of "keeping America safe." He's a tech-savvy kid, and he's brave enough and angry enough to undermine the DHS and start a kind of electronic rebellion.
Rebellion, of course, comes with consequences.
The introduction alone makes for interesting reading. Doctorow talks about DRM and copyright in a very accessible way. The internet is changing how artists have to think about distribution, be that authors, musicians, photographers, anyone. As Doctorow says, quoting Tim O'Reilly: "For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity." He makes the case that DRM is more a hurt than a help, hence why part of his deal with his publishers is that you can download Little Brother for free. (Ohyes. Go do it now.)
Every chapter is dedicated to a different bookstore, with a blurb about them or an anecdote of Doctorow's own experiences with the stores and their employees. Obviously, authors aren't going to leave the chains out - B&N, Borders, Amazon and a few others get their mentions, but the real gems are the shout-outs to Borderlands, Mysterious Galaxy, Tattered Cover, and the other indies.
And so, on to the story itself.
We meet Marcus just as he's getting ready to sneak out of school for the afternoon. The book is set in the near-future: the year isn't specified, but I'd guess it's around 2010 or so. The technology is a bit more advanced than present-day, but nothing is terribly far-fetched. They use school-issued laptops that log keystrokes and monitor the sites kids visit during classtime. Of course, Marcus has found his way around this, running a browser and an IM session that flies under the radar. You know right off the bat he's a damned smart kid.
His voice, to me, initially came off as cocky and a bit pretentious, but I had to remind myself that this is YA lit. It's not going to read the same way as other things I enjoy. (It's been suggested in the discussions at Making Light that the voice sounds almost like Doctorow's own. I am at best an infrequent visitor to his blogs, so I can't speak to that, myself.) However, once I let myself consider the audience a bit, and think of what I enjoyed reading 15 or so years ago, I was able to move past what bothered me. Younger-me would quite likely haved liked Marcus from page one.
There's a lot of talk about security and surveillance, and a third of the way in, I was chilled. Doctorow's not just making this stuf up. You can google plenty of the things mentioned throughout the book, and what makes it all the more terrifying is how plausible all of it is. What doesn't exist yet will soon, or already does, but just isn't available to the public yet. And here I am, all proud of myself for using Firefox as my browser with NoScript installed, and I've barely even scratched the surface when it comes to protecting my privacy online.
While Marcus can be a bit of a smartass, standing up and mouthing off a bit to the vice principal and later, the DHS agents, his bravado very quickly disappears when the fear kicks in. It's refreshing, when so many times in YA - in fan fiction and in published novels both - the main character snots all over the place and gets away with it. When Marcus tries, he learns that it doesn't work that way.
When he begins his rebellion, he also learns (several times) that his actions have consequences. Sure, it's fun tying up all of San Francisco by messing with RFIDs and screwing up tracking patterns. But when other kids get detained (not, mind you arrested - very few people are actually arrested and charged over the course of the book), Marcus realizes that his calls for civil disobedience may very well get other people tortured. At a concert-turned-protest, kids get gassed when they don't disperse. It scares the hell out of him - I did this. I started it. He doubts himself. He gets scared as much for his own safety as he is for others'. When it looks like the DHS will be actively going after the kids caught jamming, he sends out a plea for people to stop.
In times like those, when he's ready to give up and lay low, to try living a life as close to normal as he can, it's his friends' passion and commitment to winning back their freedom that keeps him going. It's never easy to do these things alone.
Of course, when your main character is seventeen, chances are there's going to be a bit of romance. There's a girl named Ange, and she and Marcus fall for each other. Ange is a good character, as much a leader as Marcus is. She's strong and not afraid to say what she wants. There's a lot of talk about the chances of Little Brother making its way onto banned books lists. I certainly think it will, though not because it encourages kids to look for holes and flaws in security systems. I have a feeling that all the technology and the idea of speaking out for your rights will be overlooked in place of "Oh my god, two kids have sex." It's honestly not graphic, and doesn't take up all that much of the story. It's told in a voice that's a bit awkward and a bit breathless and completely taken up by this new love, and then we fade to black (but not before we are informed that they'll be using a condom.)
Marcus gets a bit melodramatic every once in a while when he talks about Ange ("Ange, my Ange, my angel...") but most of the time, it's just a kid in a relationship, feeling all those Big New Love things.
I'm torn about my feelings on the end of the book. For the first half, Marcus feels like they can't possibly tell any adults what happened to them in the days after the bombings - no one's going to buy their story. It's believable enough, when you consider how afraid they were made to be. Even if they did talk to their parents, they were scared that it would only land them right back where they'd been.
By the end, though, he goes and tells his parents, and they are supportive, as is the journalist they go and talk to. There's a deus ex machina moment at the end, where he's been taken into custody once again, and just as it's getting really bad, in comes the cavalry. I'm not quite sure it works. On the one hand, it's a situation you very much don't want Marcus to be in. On the other, it feels a bit contrived.
There's a debate about the amount of exposition happening over at Making Light as well. I felt it was mostly seamless. Marcus occasionally went into detailed explanation about the things his readers might not know. How many kids actually know what LARPing is? What do you know about cryptography, internet protocols, and Alan Turing? He explains it and manages to make it all accessible. He doesn't veer into jargon without defining it. He doesn't talk down to the reader.
The place where the exposition bogs down, actually is where Marcus isn't the one As-You-Know-Bobbing. His teacher, Ms. Galvez, tells the class about the hippie movement, and that gets clunky, like he didn't quite have the right rhythm for the dialogue. The history itself was interesting, but the presentation could have been better.
I worry a bit that the swiftness with which the DHS steps in (and how quick they are to resort to stress positions and other forms of torture) is hard to accept, though I think this is more my own personal trouble with suspension of disbelief than it is Doctorow's writing. It's set so close to our own present that I'm looking at it more as 2008 than a few years from now. But when I think back to Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale, those are also books set in future versions of our own society, and I was able to settle in to them quite easily - likely because they were vastly different realities, where Little Brother is very close to our own time and situation.
There are afterwords from Bruce Schneier and "Bunnie" Huang, encouraging kids to look for weaknesses, to be creative and clever and unafraid. Doctorow's own closing acknowledgements offer some great links and reading suggestions. He is, as he admits, standing on the shoulders of giants, and names his influences.
So, I can happily recommend Little Brother. Being one of those over-25s that Marcus and his friends decide can't be trusted, I still really enjoyed it. I'm guessing its true YA audience will love it. If you do download it and read it and find it worthy of passing on to a teen in your life (or if you think it would be a good book to get into schools), I'd suggest following the links to the donate-a-book program linked in the introduction.
It definitely should open up some excellent classroom dialogues on the meaning of free speech, security, and privacy.
The author in question is Cory Doctorow, whom you might also know as the co-editor of Boing Boing.
I have so many things to say about his new YA book, Little Brother, that I'm not even sure where to begin. I suppose the best place is with a synopsis. So!
Marcus Yallow, a high school senior in San Fransciso, ditches school with three of his friends to play an Alternate Reality Game. While they're tracking down a clue, terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge. Marcus and his friends are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and find themselves taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security.
When they're released - after several days of cruel interrogation - Marcus realizes how many of the freedoms he'd taken for granted are now being taken away under the guise of "keeping America safe." He's a tech-savvy kid, and he's brave enough and angry enough to undermine the DHS and start a kind of electronic rebellion.
Rebellion, of course, comes with consequences.
The introduction alone makes for interesting reading. Doctorow talks about DRM and copyright in a very accessible way. The internet is changing how artists have to think about distribution, be that authors, musicians, photographers, anyone. As Doctorow says, quoting Tim O'Reilly: "For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity." He makes the case that DRM is more a hurt than a help, hence why part of his deal with his publishers is that you can download Little Brother for free. (Ohyes. Go do it now.)
Every chapter is dedicated to a different bookstore, with a blurb about them or an anecdote of Doctorow's own experiences with the stores and their employees. Obviously, authors aren't going to leave the chains out - B&N, Borders, Amazon and a few others get their mentions, but the real gems are the shout-outs to Borderlands, Mysterious Galaxy, Tattered Cover, and the other indies.
And so, on to the story itself.
We meet Marcus just as he's getting ready to sneak out of school for the afternoon. The book is set in the near-future: the year isn't specified, but I'd guess it's around 2010 or so. The technology is a bit more advanced than present-day, but nothing is terribly far-fetched. They use school-issued laptops that log keystrokes and monitor the sites kids visit during classtime. Of course, Marcus has found his way around this, running a browser and an IM session that flies under the radar. You know right off the bat he's a damned smart kid.
His voice, to me, initially came off as cocky and a bit pretentious, but I had to remind myself that this is YA lit. It's not going to read the same way as other things I enjoy. (It's been suggested in the discussions at Making Light that the voice sounds almost like Doctorow's own. I am at best an infrequent visitor to his blogs, so I can't speak to that, myself.) However, once I let myself consider the audience a bit, and think of what I enjoyed reading 15 or so years ago, I was able to move past what bothered me. Younger-me would quite likely haved liked Marcus from page one.
There's a lot of talk about security and surveillance, and a third of the way in, I was chilled. Doctorow's not just making this stuf up. You can google plenty of the things mentioned throughout the book, and what makes it all the more terrifying is how plausible all of it is. What doesn't exist yet will soon, or already does, but just isn't available to the public yet. And here I am, all proud of myself for using Firefox as my browser with NoScript installed, and I've barely even scratched the surface when it comes to protecting my privacy online.
While Marcus can be a bit of a smartass, standing up and mouthing off a bit to the vice principal and later, the DHS agents, his bravado very quickly disappears when the fear kicks in. It's refreshing, when so many times in YA - in fan fiction and in published novels both - the main character snots all over the place and gets away with it. When Marcus tries, he learns that it doesn't work that way.
When he begins his rebellion, he also learns (several times) that his actions have consequences. Sure, it's fun tying up all of San Francisco by messing with RFIDs and screwing up tracking patterns. But when other kids get detained (not, mind you arrested - very few people are actually arrested and charged over the course of the book), Marcus realizes that his calls for civil disobedience may very well get other people tortured. At a concert-turned-protest, kids get gassed when they don't disperse. It scares the hell out of him - I did this. I started it. He doubts himself. He gets scared as much for his own safety as he is for others'. When it looks like the DHS will be actively going after the kids caught jamming, he sends out a plea for people to stop.
In times like those, when he's ready to give up and lay low, to try living a life as close to normal as he can, it's his friends' passion and commitment to winning back their freedom that keeps him going. It's never easy to do these things alone.
Of course, when your main character is seventeen, chances are there's going to be a bit of romance. There's a girl named Ange, and she and Marcus fall for each other. Ange is a good character, as much a leader as Marcus is. She's strong and not afraid to say what she wants. There's a lot of talk about the chances of Little Brother making its way onto banned books lists. I certainly think it will, though not because it encourages kids to look for holes and flaws in security systems. I have a feeling that all the technology and the idea of speaking out for your rights will be overlooked in place of "Oh my god, two kids have sex." It's honestly not graphic, and doesn't take up all that much of the story. It's told in a voice that's a bit awkward and a bit breathless and completely taken up by this new love, and then we fade to black (but not before we are informed that they'll be using a condom.)
Marcus gets a bit melodramatic every once in a while when he talks about Ange ("Ange, my Ange, my angel...") but most of the time, it's just a kid in a relationship, feeling all those Big New Love things.
I'm torn about my feelings on the end of the book. For the first half, Marcus feels like they can't possibly tell any adults what happened to them in the days after the bombings - no one's going to buy their story. It's believable enough, when you consider how afraid they were made to be. Even if they did talk to their parents, they were scared that it would only land them right back where they'd been.
By the end, though, he goes and tells his parents, and they are supportive, as is the journalist they go and talk to. There's a deus ex machina moment at the end, where he's been taken into custody once again, and just as it's getting really bad, in comes the cavalry. I'm not quite sure it works. On the one hand, it's a situation you very much don't want Marcus to be in. On the other, it feels a bit contrived.
There's a debate about the amount of exposition happening over at Making Light as well. I felt it was mostly seamless. Marcus occasionally went into detailed explanation about the things his readers might not know. How many kids actually know what LARPing is? What do you know about cryptography, internet protocols, and Alan Turing? He explains it and manages to make it all accessible. He doesn't veer into jargon without defining it. He doesn't talk down to the reader.
The place where the exposition bogs down, actually is where Marcus isn't the one As-You-Know-Bobbing. His teacher, Ms. Galvez, tells the class about the hippie movement, and that gets clunky, like he didn't quite have the right rhythm for the dialogue. The history itself was interesting, but the presentation could have been better.
I worry a bit that the swiftness with which the DHS steps in (and how quick they are to resort to stress positions and other forms of torture) is hard to accept, though I think this is more my own personal trouble with suspension of disbelief than it is Doctorow's writing. It's set so close to our own present that I'm looking at it more as 2008 than a few years from now. But when I think back to Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale, those are also books set in future versions of our own society, and I was able to settle in to them quite easily - likely because they were vastly different realities, where Little Brother is very close to our own time and situation.
There are afterwords from Bruce Schneier and "Bunnie" Huang, encouraging kids to look for weaknesses, to be creative and clever and unafraid. Doctorow's own closing acknowledgements offer some great links and reading suggestions. He is, as he admits, standing on the shoulders of giants, and names his influences.
So, I can happily recommend Little Brother. Being one of those over-25s that Marcus and his friends decide can't be trusted, I still really enjoyed it. I'm guessing its true YA audience will love it. If you do download it and read it and find it worthy of passing on to a teen in your life (or if you think it would be a good book to get into schools), I'd suggest following the links to the donate-a-book program linked in the introduction.
It definitely should open up some excellent classroom dialogues on the meaning of free speech, security, and privacy.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Tuesday Musing: The Sony Reader
I mentioned a while back that my company handed out Sony e-Readers to some of the employees. The idea to relate my experiences with it got shoved on the backburner, but never quite went away.
Now that I've had a couple of months to play around and get a better feel for it, it's review time!
For the moment, let's put the comparison toflesh-and-blood paper-and-ink books aside, and look at the Reader as a device on its own.
Full disclosure: I'm a fan of gadgets. There are many people out there far more cutting-edge than I, but I have my iPod and my digital camera. My cell phone can flip around and be used as a keyboard for texting. The oooh-shiny factor for this is certainly high.
It's lightweight - just a bit bigger than a mass market paperback - and slim enough that I keep it in my purse. The interface is pretty self-explanatory, and the type is easy on the eyes. It's not like you're reading stark black-and-white words off of a computer screen. The font size can be increased or decreased to make reading easier.
You can bookmark pages in what you're reading, but at the moment there's no way to jot down your own notes about why you bookmarked whatever it was.
It can store a lot of books at once. So, if you're going on a trip and don't want to pack five different books into your carry-on (because you might finish this one, or not be in the mood for that one right now, or you only have a hundred pages left in your current one and your husband has been known to steal the backup book because he finished his first, leaving you with nothing but Skymall until he drifts off and you can steal it back from his sleeping grasp...), the Reader is a good way to carry a lot of books without lugging around your own weight in fiction.
There's an option to organize your books into collections - perhaps you want to keep the horror from touching the romances, or you have books you're reading for pleasure and books you're using for research. The program you use to transfer books from your computer to the eReader allows you to arrange them in whatever groupings make you happy.
The battery is supposed to last about 7,500 page turns before it needs recharging. I find mine to be draining much faster than that, closer to every 1,000. However it doesn't take that long to charge back up.
There are two different spots that control pageturning, one in the bottom left-hand corner and another along the right-hand edge of the reader. Most of the time, these are where your fingers or thumbs rest naturally when you're holding it. Unfortunately, I have a subway commute that occasionally forces me into strange, pretzel-like contortions so I can keep reading while everyone's shoving for space. It's times like those I wish there was one more pageturning button up near the top of the device.
For reading manuscripts my company is publishing, it's a nifty tool and it cuts way down on the amount of photocopying and distributing we've done in the past. I used to have shelves full of forthcoming books, some of which I might never get around to reading all the way through. Recycling them always brought a pang of guilt for the waste of paper. Now, I can go ahead and download those same manuscripts onto the eReader, and if I don't finish something, no trees were sacrificed for my fickleness.
But how does it compare to reading a real book?
It doesn't.
As portable as it can be, as "green" as the device is, it is not the same as holding a book in my hand. Reading is as much a tactile experience as it is a mental one. There's something to be said for the feel of pages at your fingertips and the weight of a book in your lap.
If I fill it up, I will eventually have to delete old titles to make room for new ones. If I want to go back to something I've removed, I either have to download it (and pay for it!) again, or at least hook the device up to my computer and transfer the file back over. With bound books, you can simply pluck something off your bookshelf to find a line you want to quote, or a single chapter you want to reread.
Sometimes, it breaks.
No, really. It gets touchy. Several times I've had it hooked up to my computer to charge the battery or to add/remove titles, and after shutting it down and properly removing the hardware, it doesn't want to start up again. It will sit at the loading screen, frozen, the books I want to read completely inaccessible unless I can find a paperclip, a pin, or the back of an earring to push the tiny reset button imbedded in the back of the Reader.
Maybe other people carry paper clips and pins around with them. I don't; I was a crappy Girl Scout. And while my ears are pierced, on a normal day I'm probably not wearing earrings. So, when I get to the train station and the eReader hangs, floundering as it tries and fails to boot itself up, I am essentially left bookless on my hour-long ride home. Paper-and-ink books don't fail you like that. Nor do you have to remember to bring a cord with you to recharge them should they run out of battery power in the middle of your trip.
And, the thing that will always, always make bound books trump any kind of e-reader for me:
You can't share the majority of the books you download to your Sony Reader, or your Kindle, or any other electronic reader with your friends. How many times have you loved a book so much, you press it into someone's hands and say, "You must read this?" There are at least three people reading this blog whom I've done it to, and who have done it to me in return.
The books coming out from most of the larger publishers come with DRM restrictions. You can't port your e-book over to your friend's reader. I suppose you can let your friend borrow your eReader (if you each have $300 to spend on one), but then what are you going to read in the meantime?
DRM is another rant in and of itself, which I'd like to address in the future. However, the author of the book I'll be reviewing this Friday nails it in the intro to his latest (DRM free!) book. I'll be cutting and pasting bits of that as part of the review - what he says before the story even starts is just as important as the story itself. (And the fact that I'm reading it DRM-free might tip some of you intarwebz-savvy people off as to which book it is, or at least which author, but for now, you'll have to remain in suspense.)
But, as it relates to the Sony Reader, unless publishers lift their DRM restrictions and allow customers to pass along the e-Books to friends, it threatens to strike a harsh blow to word-of-mouth recommendations. In these days of $25.00 hardcovers, how likely is it that someone will take a chance on a book that a friend recommended that they haven't even flipped through? Consider instead - if I lend you a book and you love it, you are likely to go buy a copy of that book yourself, to keep. Then, since you are now familiar with that author - since you trust that author - you will also pick up his/her next book on your own when it comes out.
All the flash and sparkle of the eReader dims when you realize that that goes away, all because of DRM.
So, my final verdict - the Sony Reader is a great tool as far as work goes, but for replacing regular books in your leisure time? No thank you. I'll keep the walls of my rooms lined with full bookshelves and suffer the sore shoulder from the books weighing down my carry-on bag, thank you very much.
Now that I've had a couple of months to play around and get a better feel for it, it's review time!
For the moment, let's put the comparison to
Full disclosure: I'm a fan of gadgets. There are many people out there far more cutting-edge than I, but I have my iPod and my digital camera. My cell phone can flip around and be used as a keyboard for texting. The oooh-shiny factor for this is certainly high.
It's lightweight - just a bit bigger than a mass market paperback - and slim enough that I keep it in my purse. The interface is pretty self-explanatory, and the type is easy on the eyes. It's not like you're reading stark black-and-white words off of a computer screen. The font size can be increased or decreased to make reading easier.
You can bookmark pages in what you're reading, but at the moment there's no way to jot down your own notes about why you bookmarked whatever it was.
It can store a lot of books at once. So, if you're going on a trip and don't want to pack five different books into your carry-on (because you might finish this one, or not be in the mood for that one right now, or you only have a hundred pages left in your current one and your husband has been known to steal the backup book because he finished his first, leaving you with nothing but Skymall until he drifts off and you can steal it back from his sleeping grasp...), the Reader is a good way to carry a lot of books without lugging around your own weight in fiction.
There's an option to organize your books into collections - perhaps you want to keep the horror from touching the romances, or you have books you're reading for pleasure and books you're using for research. The program you use to transfer books from your computer to the eReader allows you to arrange them in whatever groupings make you happy.
The battery is supposed to last about 7,500 page turns before it needs recharging. I find mine to be draining much faster than that, closer to every 1,000. However it doesn't take that long to charge back up.
There are two different spots that control pageturning, one in the bottom left-hand corner and another along the right-hand edge of the reader. Most of the time, these are where your fingers or thumbs rest naturally when you're holding it. Unfortunately, I have a subway commute that occasionally forces me into strange, pretzel-like contortions so I can keep reading while everyone's shoving for space. It's times like those I wish there was one more pageturning button up near the top of the device.
For reading manuscripts my company is publishing, it's a nifty tool and it cuts way down on the amount of photocopying and distributing we've done in the past. I used to have shelves full of forthcoming books, some of which I might never get around to reading all the way through. Recycling them always brought a pang of guilt for the waste of paper. Now, I can go ahead and download those same manuscripts onto the eReader, and if I don't finish something, no trees were sacrificed for my fickleness.
But how does it compare to reading a real book?
It doesn't.
As portable as it can be, as "green" as the device is, it is not the same as holding a book in my hand. Reading is as much a tactile experience as it is a mental one. There's something to be said for the feel of pages at your fingertips and the weight of a book in your lap.
If I fill it up, I will eventually have to delete old titles to make room for new ones. If I want to go back to something I've removed, I either have to download it (and pay for it!) again, or at least hook the device up to my computer and transfer the file back over. With bound books, you can simply pluck something off your bookshelf to find a line you want to quote, or a single chapter you want to reread.
Sometimes, it breaks.
No, really. It gets touchy. Several times I've had it hooked up to my computer to charge the battery or to add/remove titles, and after shutting it down and properly removing the hardware, it doesn't want to start up again. It will sit at the loading screen, frozen, the books I want to read completely inaccessible unless I can find a paperclip, a pin, or the back of an earring to push the tiny reset button imbedded in the back of the Reader.
Maybe other people carry paper clips and pins around with them. I don't; I was a crappy Girl Scout. And while my ears are pierced, on a normal day I'm probably not wearing earrings. So, when I get to the train station and the eReader hangs, floundering as it tries and fails to boot itself up, I am essentially left bookless on my hour-long ride home. Paper-and-ink books don't fail you like that. Nor do you have to remember to bring a cord with you to recharge them should they run out of battery power in the middle of your trip.
And, the thing that will always, always make bound books trump any kind of e-reader for me:
You can't share the majority of the books you download to your Sony Reader, or your Kindle, or any other electronic reader with your friends. How many times have you loved a book so much, you press it into someone's hands and say, "You must read this?" There are at least three people reading this blog whom I've done it to, and who have done it to me in return.
The books coming out from most of the larger publishers come with DRM restrictions. You can't port your e-book over to your friend's reader. I suppose you can let your friend borrow your eReader (if you each have $300 to spend on one), but then what are you going to read in the meantime?
DRM is another rant in and of itself, which I'd like to address in the future. However, the author of the book I'll be reviewing this Friday nails it in the intro to his latest (DRM free!) book. I'll be cutting and pasting bits of that as part of the review - what he says before the story even starts is just as important as the story itself. (And the fact that I'm reading it DRM-free might tip some of you intarwebz-savvy people off as to which book it is, or at least which author, but for now, you'll have to remain in suspense.)
But, as it relates to the Sony Reader, unless publishers lift their DRM restrictions and allow customers to pass along the e-Books to friends, it threatens to strike a harsh blow to word-of-mouth recommendations. In these days of $25.00 hardcovers, how likely is it that someone will take a chance on a book that a friend recommended that they haven't even flipped through? Consider instead - if I lend you a book and you love it, you are likely to go buy a copy of that book yourself, to keep. Then, since you are now familiar with that author - since you trust that author - you will also pick up his/her next book on your own when it comes out.
All the flash and sparkle of the eReader dims when you realize that that goes away, all because of DRM.
So, my final verdict - the Sony Reader is a great tool as far as work goes, but for replacing regular books in your leisure time? No thank you. I'll keep the walls of my rooms lined with full bookshelves and suffer the sore shoulder from the books weighing down my carry-on bag, thank you very much.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Review: Gentlemen of the Road
It's Friday, and I promised a review of a book that didn't suck.
A caveat, before we begin: I've never done any kind of serious book reviewing before. This isn't going to read like something in the New York Review of Books or Publishers Weekly. My experience is in handselling, and that's how I'm going to attempt to approach these Friday reviews - like you're a customer who has wandered into my store and said, "What's good?"
Okay?
Okay.
It's fitting, then, that this first book, Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, came to me as a recommendation from Marty and another friend.
It's possible that I was predisposed to love it - I devoured The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. However, where that book was set in New York during the Golden Age of comics, Gentlemen of the Road brings us all the way back to 950AD.
Pardon my awkwardness with a synopsis - I don't want to give too much away. Amram and Zelikman are the gentlemen of the title, though they are joined by others on the way. They are travelers, brothers at heart, but not blood relations. They are fighting men and occasional swindlers - whatever earns them enough to continue on their adventures. They also - Amram especially, but Zelikman, too - have a habit of doing the right thing. Which is, of course, what sets the tale in motion. There's a boy, you see - not quite a man - and he was a prince, until his father was overthrown. Amram and Zelikman are tasked with bringing him to the safety of family to the south, but the boy, Filaq, slips away with the intention of returning home and seeking vengeance.
There's your first chapter or two.
I am a sucker for the lonely characters, the good-natured not-quite villains who know they are flawed and live with it - or despite it, or because of it. Zelikman (and his appreciation for a good hat) had me hooked from the start. He's prone to bouts of melancholy, and has a sword that is mostly a thin, pointed bit of metal named Lancet. And a loyal horse named Hillel. I can't help it. He's one of those characters I fall in love with, just a little bit. Maybe someday I'll share a few of the others; some of you probably can guess a few of them.
Chabon's narration is nothing short of breathtaking. He takes his time with a scene, occasionally digressing just long enough to enrich the original point. Points of view switch seamlessly, not breaking the overall voice.
The story itself is finely crafted, leading you along on their journey and, yes, once or twice breaking your heart, just a bit.** There are writers who can weave poetry into prose, and Chabon is one of them. The story is a twisting adventure, loyalties changing (though never, truly, Amram's or Zelikman's), battles fought, and every page is a kind of verse.
Gary Gianni's black and white illustrations are gorgeous, too. It should be no surprise that the ones I liked best were the ones featuring Zelikman.
I'm drifting dangerously into talking about things that are spoilers - there are rousing speeches and heroism (big and small), rescues and chases and redemptions, and the whole thing leaves you wanting more. I don't know if Chabon plans on returning to these characters in the future, but if he does, I will be there at the bookstore on the laydown date, and the cover will be opened before I'm even out of the store.
**Get used to this: I gravitate towards books that break my heart.
A caveat, before we begin: I've never done any kind of serious book reviewing before. This isn't going to read like something in the New York Review of Books or Publishers Weekly. My experience is in handselling, and that's how I'm going to attempt to approach these Friday reviews - like you're a customer who has wandered into my store and said, "What's good?"
Okay?
Okay.
It's fitting, then, that this first book, Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, came to me as a recommendation from Marty and another friend.
It's possible that I was predisposed to love it - I devoured The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. However, where that book was set in New York during the Golden Age of comics, Gentlemen of the Road brings us all the way back to 950AD.
Pardon my awkwardness with a synopsis - I don't want to give too much away. Amram and Zelikman are the gentlemen of the title, though they are joined by others on the way. They are travelers, brothers at heart, but not blood relations. They are fighting men and occasional swindlers - whatever earns them enough to continue on their adventures. They also - Amram especially, but Zelikman, too - have a habit of doing the right thing. Which is, of course, what sets the tale in motion. There's a boy, you see - not quite a man - and he was a prince, until his father was overthrown. Amram and Zelikman are tasked with bringing him to the safety of family to the south, but the boy, Filaq, slips away with the intention of returning home and seeking vengeance.
There's your first chapter or two.
I am a sucker for the lonely characters, the good-natured not-quite villains who know they are flawed and live with it - or despite it, or because of it. Zelikman (and his appreciation for a good hat) had me hooked from the start. He's prone to bouts of melancholy, and has a sword that is mostly a thin, pointed bit of metal named Lancet. And a loyal horse named Hillel. I can't help it. He's one of those characters I fall in love with, just a little bit. Maybe someday I'll share a few of the others; some of you probably can guess a few of them.
Chabon's narration is nothing short of breathtaking. He takes his time with a scene, occasionally digressing just long enough to enrich the original point. Points of view switch seamlessly, not breaking the overall voice.
The story itself is finely crafted, leading you along on their journey and, yes, once or twice breaking your heart, just a bit.** There are writers who can weave poetry into prose, and Chabon is one of them. The story is a twisting adventure, loyalties changing (though never, truly, Amram's or Zelikman's), battles fought, and every page is a kind of verse.
Gary Gianni's black and white illustrations are gorgeous, too. It should be no surprise that the ones I liked best were the ones featuring Zelikman.
I'm drifting dangerously into talking about things that are spoilers - there are rousing speeches and heroism (big and small), rescues and chases and redemptions, and the whole thing leaves you wanting more. I don't know if Chabon plans on returning to these characters in the future, but if he does, I will be there at the bookstore on the laydown date, and the cover will be opened before I'm even out of the store.
**Get used to this: I gravitate towards books that break my heart.
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