Mr. G. gave me a Kindle for my birthday (by request). I am most pleased with it. Light, very easy to transport on the Metro, and to take on the very occasional get-away. Also, you can make the print big and not strain your eyes at the end of the day. I really must be getting old if I am extolling the virtues of big print.
The honor of the first Kindle book was River of Darkness - the original John Madden mystery by Rennie Auth. Very enjoyable.
I am now back to print, care of Ms. Brenda. I am reading the latest Maisie Dobbs mystery. I just love this character. So independent. I am half way through and intend to spend the rest of the evening reading. We are having a Spring thunderstorm - perfect for reading until we lose power.
What are you reading? Bethie
Blogger Nazis Are At It Again. 2-part post follows. (God willing…)
ReplyDeleteOK, taking it from the top.
No particular push to read Daughter of Time. It’s just one of my favorites—but do remember that I’m someone who has watched Love Actually hundreds of times and who is now re-watching Gilmore Girls for the 4th (yes, FOURTH) time. And who actually likes Sister Wives.
Bethie—congrats on joining the digital reading revolution. At the moment, you cannot download a digital or audio book from the library to your Kindle, but I’ve been assured by our local librarian that Amazon has formally announced that they will have an upgrade sometime this year that will allow this and when that happens, hold on to your literary hats, bitches…you will be able to download a book in a matter of minutes, all while you are still in your jammies, and may even be still in bed!
In the meantime, I finally figured out that I can download eBooks and audio books to my laptop for free from the liberry and that has made me happier than almost any other news I’ve received lately. The library had a session a couple of weeks ago on “Use of Electronic Books,” and the first 4 people who turned up at the presentation were all clutching Kindles. The poor little geek-y boy who was teaching the class kept getting paler and more clammy every time someone new arrived with a Kindle in hand—since all he was going to be able to say was, “No, actually, the library e-Books and audio books don’t work on Kindles. Sorry.” Fortunately, he perked up a bit when the next 4 people came armed with 3 Nooks and 1 Sony Reader. And don’t think less of yourself about switching to larger type; it’s one of the best features of e-readers. I always go up a font size at night, when my eyes are tired or the light isn’t quite right. I am especially fond of the search function (no more staring at a character’s name and thinking, “Now, I know I’ve seen that name before, but I can’t remember why or where”—all you have to do is type the name into “Search” and it’ll take you to a list of every place the name is used. The first item on the list is inevitably the point where the character is introduced and suddenly, you know exactly who they are, painlessly! I also love the instant access to the on-line dictionary. No more puzzling about what a “baobob” might be.
What am I reading? First, if you like River of Darkness, you might want to try a similarly named (although otherwise, no connection) one we read last year called River of Doubt, which is about Theodore Roosevelt’s ill-fated trip down the Amazon in the early 1920s. Sounds a bit dull but it proved to be surprisingly gripping, especially in audio form. I’m discovering that if I’m faced with a non-fiction book that is daunting, listening to it is the way to go.
ReplyDeleteThis month, the book group read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is a book that I think that both Bethie and Brenda would like and (maybe Ann too, since while she isn’t a trained scientist, she’s certainly interested in learning), given that it’s the true story of an uneducated young black woman who dies of cervical cancer in 1951, leaving 5 young children behind. Her tissues were sent to the lab at Johns Hopkins for post-mortem analysis and another tissue sample was sent to another lab at Johns Hopkins that was working on cancer research. Usually, cells outside the body die fairly soon, but in the case of this particular woman, they just plain didn’t. And still are alive and thriving 60 years later. They have formed the basis for most of the medical research done in the past 60 years (under their cell-strain name, HeLa)—polio, AIDS, cloning, etc. They’ve gone to the moon. Her family, poor, uneducated, didn’t find out how her cells were used until the early 1970s and then spent the next 40 years trying to understand what had happened to her and what having “immortal cells” means. Their struggle to understand the concept of living cells is really heart-breaking—they are so uneducated that when they learn that their mother’s cells are still alive, they deduce that there are clones of her walking around and live in terror that they’ll just run into her on the street one day.
The medical folks in the P-Town book group (at least one nurse and one lab worker—one of the charms of the book group is that it’s quite impersonal: you just find out about what people do/who they are, etc., by what they say during the discussion. Which means that you might THINK that Martha is a nurse, but you don’t know for sure—she works doing something in the medical field, but exactly what isn’t clear. She could be a famous neurosurgeon or again she could be an orderly) all thought it was an “important” book. Not sure what that means, exactly, but it was a gripping read, or, rather, a gripping listen, since I downloaded the audio book from the library for free! I can’t describe how happy FREE makes me.
Brenda’s musings on the joys and horrors of Project Runway were called “Brenda’s Blasts”. I’m going to coin another term for MY entries: Susan’s Rambles. Primary rule: never say something in 9 words when 99 are available!
Off to watch the deplorable Sister Wives. I’m only steps away from becoming a secret-cult Mormon and trying to find a family of 4 wives, 1 husband, and 16 children of my very own. I’ll keep you posted on my conversion.
Love, Sister Susan