I just finished Lois McMaster Bujold’s Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance and enjoyed it. A nice mix of humor and drama; significantly better than the last Vorkosigan book Cryoburn I think.
Really, with a title that pretentious, the damn thing is doomed from the start. (However, it’s a sure way to get your book to make the rounds on NPR. Even better than it being about jazz!)
I’ve just finished Hawk Quest by Robert Lyndon; a big historical epic of a journey first to find, and then to pay a ransom to the Turks after the Battle of Manzikert in Turkey. It starts in 1072 in the north of England as some of William the Conqueror’s Norman forces are doing some ‘rough wooing’ to subdue the locals. Normans, Norse, Vikings, Rus, Franks and more end up having to work together to survive the various perils they meet along the way. Great fun!
Now started Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. It’s set in the 1st half of the 20th C and tells the stories of a baby born in 1910, or did she die at birth? Or drown in a seaside accident, or from the cold the following winter? Each itteration of her life lasts a bit longer, and her various fates affect those arond her and thus history at first subtly, then more dramatically… Excellent so far, but she’s only reached the age of five!
I’m having some funny trouble with my Kobo. It is supposed to save your page when it goes to sleep or when you shut it down. Instead, it is selecting some arbitrary page in a chapter I’ve already read. Using the button to make a bookmark doesn’t seem to help. It’s only doing this on one particular book, and strangely enough, it’s one of the few books I’ve actually bought from the Kobo store (as opposed to the ~200 I’ve downloaded from Project Gutenberg). My kluge has been to annotate a particular word, and that seems to get it, but still…
My personal jury is out on e-books vs. paper editions. I certainly enjoy having the complete Dickens, Jane Austen, Hornblower series, etc. in one slightly-smaller-than-a-trade-paperback format. The dictionaries are handy for reading in another language. (In English, it’s a pretty safe rule of thumb that if I need to look it up a word, the Kobo dictionary isn’t going to have it…)
On the other hand, notes are pretty inconsistent. It can’t look up a specific page number, and it’s nowhere near as easy to look up a passage that I read the other day to quote it to somebody. If I’m sitting at home reading, I still strongly prefer the original paper.
I’m loving the content of ‘The Travels of Marco Polo’, but it makes me yearn for a large coffee table edition with maps, photos and footnotes that I can choose. I’ll probably finish the e-book edition in any case, but this is one I’d much rather read in a ‘too large to carry’ edition.
How do the rest of you feel about the medium that brings your books to your eyes?
I got a Kindle (keyboard) about 2 years ago and really liked it. A couple months ago, my SO surprised me with a Kindle Fire. I was quite hesitant to adopt it as I had enjoyed reading on the glare-reduced screen of my standard Kindle. A couple months later and I’ve really taken to it. A big part has been inverting the text so it’s white on black instead. But I really like how flipping pages is so much quicker and less visually distracting.
I think there’s a new update on the Fire as I just noticed on a book I am currently reading that it gives a countdown in minutes until the end of the chapter.
My tiniest of complaints would be that sometimes it changes where paragraphs are in relation to the screen. (Let’s say I’m mid-chapter, go to check something else on line and then return to the book. The position of the first paragraph might now be two paragraphs down. The book is still in order, it’s just shifted).
In light of Iain Bank’sterrible news, I would like to know which of his non-Culture books, written as Iain Banks, are your favorites.
My favorites are The Wasp Factory and Complicity.
I actually prefer his non-SF stuff.
Sad news. Foreshadowed by the fate of the narrator in Complicity.
#1 with a bullet - Espedair Street. I have read it at least 5 or 6 times, and I still love it.
The Crow Road - this is the most Scottish book I know. In my humble opinion, there is no better volume for expressing Scottish society.
I’ve never read Banks, but still sad to hear; any man’s death diminishes me.
I’m quite in love w/ my Kindle, though I mostly use the app on my phone or iPad. (The Kindle itself came in very handy during Sandy, though–the long battery life was a life-saver.) Part of that is living in Manhattan; I don’t have much room for physical books and I’m always reading on the subway. But even when I move out, I expect my habits will not much change–physical books will be for the special ones, Kindle for the rest. Interestingly, I especially like the way Kindle treats w/ annotations–tap on a endnote marker and it takes you there; tap the ‘back’ button and you’re right back. Much more convenient than having to page to the back of the book and keep your finger in. I do wish they’d somehow segregate them from the page count/percentage complete, as you can get a bit of a shock hitting the end of a book at “only” 60% complete.
See, in theory, the Kobo functions the same way. In practice, it’s ‘tap’, ‘tap’, ‘tap’ over and over again, with the thing either turning the page on me or looking up the nearest word in the dictionary. Then, when I finally get to the endnote, I can’t get back. I’ve just given up on reading footnotes/endnotes on the bloody thing.
So what do you call a functionality that doesn’t? 
I finished reading Nicholas Nickleby. I thought it was not bad: better than Our Mutual Friend or The Old Curiosity Shop but not as good as David Copperfield or The Pickwick Papers.
It still suffered from the usual problem where 20% of the plot is in the first 80% of the book and 80% of the plot is crammed into the last 20% of the book, complete with the usual Dickensian malarkey (e.g. long-lost relatives, miraculous monetary windfalls, implausible coincidences, etc.).
I like my Sony Reader and I use it far, far more than I thought I would. But it’s flaky about some things (e.g. sometimes it flips two pages at a time, sometimes it crashes if I highlight a word at the bottom of a page, sometimes it’s impossible to access a particular page unless I toggle to landscape/portrait mode). And I don’t like how it handles footnotes either. Recently I read Les Miserables and I wish I had done it with a “too large to carry” version, as you call it.
For some Project Gutenberg books, the footnotes just failed to work for me altogether.
I do occasionally get that problem, especially when the marker is near the edge of the screen. I have more problems w/ getting definitions to come up–in theory, if I hold my finger to the screen for a few seconds, it should highlight the word and bring up the definition. In practice, I hold my finger there for a few seconds, nothing happens, and I eventually give up in disgust. Minor complaint, though.
Yep, that’s the problem I have with Dickens. I can get through the beginning and end just fine, but the middle just d r a g s o n f o r e v e r.
Speaking of, I finally finished Martin Chuzzlewit yesterday. I would have liked it a lot better without the Infamous American Section. I have to agree with Doctor Who: “Mind you, for God’s sake, the American bit in Martin Chuzzlewit, what’s that about? Was that just padding? Or what? I mean, it’s rubbish, that bit.”
Next up is Dombey and Son. I can’t wait until I get to A Tale of Two Cities. That’s my favorite Dickens.
Perdido Street Station is fantastic (and extremely weird) I went on a Mieville binge after reading it, and nothing else was nearly as good in my opinion.
I’ve only read one Iain Bank’s book, Dead Air which I found decidly meh. I’ve loved every book I’ve read of his when he’s used his middle initial though.
I finished Use of Weapons a couple of days ago and have now moved onto Bernard Cornwall’s Lords of the North, the third of the Saxon Chronicles. It’s typical Cornwall, fast paced, lots of action and set in an interesting historical period.
Listening to Ken Follett’s Winter of the World in my car on unabridged audio. Pepper Mill had gotten me the first book in the series on audio, a fall of Giants, and I loved it. This one carries the story into WWII. I’m a third of the way through it.
I’m still working my way through Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars, which I finally got a copy of.
On the side, for a break from that, I’[ve read the 1974 anthology Flashing Swords #2, edited by Lin Carter. The title (and Frazetta cover painting_ are misleading – only two strories really are about barbarian swordplay. L. Sprague de Camp’s contribution has no swords at all, but I finally got to read one of his Pusadian stories, which seem to be a take on Clark ashton Smith’s Poseidonis stories about an Atlantean city.
Having finished that, I’[ve got The Hand of Zei, de camp’s second book of his Plant Krishna series.
I’ve also picked up a copy of the anthology The New Jules Verne. The seemingly absurd title refers to a set of new stories set in Verne’s fictional universe. I’m a big Verne fan, so I’ll either love this or hate it.
I got through about 25% of Game of Thrones before I got impatient and went online and spoiled myself. Because I know the 5th book ends in cliffhangers I’m probably going to put the series down until the next book comes out.
I think I’m going to start “A Short History of Nearly Everything” and “The Forever War.” I was going to read the last three books in Harry Potter, but I know that once I do I’ll be sad.
On the other hand, I feel that the end part is usually the worst because it generally feels so tacked on and rushed. (“Uh oh! I was having so much fun writing humourous vignettes that I forgot to put in any plot. I better squeeze in fifteen separate happy endings in the last thirty pages!”)
It’s like the extreme opposite of “rocks fall, everyone dies.” When he started outlining his plots before he started writing, Dickens is a lot better. Man needed an outline.
Of course I believe that Wilkie Collins handed Dickens his ass re: serial publication with The Woman in White. That’s how you do monthly installments!
Some of these should technically be March, but I’m lazy with my updating…
Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty. Entertaining book about basketball and spirituality.
Post Office: A Novel, by Charles Bukowski. I’ve read about this guy for quite a while and while it was a decent read, wasn’t particularly compelling. Alcoholic wastrel wanders through life working for the USPS. Not exactly riveting stuff in this one.
When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball by Seth Davis. Y’all get the idea that I like reading basketball books? This was a pretty informative, if at times slightly dry, book about the 1979 NCAA Championship Game between Magic Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans and Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores. Spoiler Alert: Michigan State won the game.
Tales of the Unexpected by Roald Dahl. The book that convinced me that the British Titled Class is a bunch of assholes and idiots. I especially liked the observation that butlers weren’t allowed to wear glasses because it would make them seem “too American.” Uh… OK. That’s a perfectly good reason to condemn somebody to bad eyesight - wouldn’t want their appearance to be wrong, would we? :rolleyes: Very entertaining collection of short stories, easily the best book of the four on this post. Also, who knew I could insult my wife while demanding that she cook my dinner? I’m going to change my whole approach to my marriage… I’ll let y’all know how that works out, OK? 
(BTW, I don’t necessarily think Dahl holds these opinions, just that they reflect the attitudes of the people who he was writing about.)
I haven’t read The Woman in White, but I quite liked The Moonstone.
I’ve started reading The Brothers Karamazov and it seems pretty good so far.