Books

I thought it would be cool to write monthly posts about what books we've read, except obviously I've already blown that by not getting around to writing an end-of-January post. Plus I'm pretty sure it would work better if I actually took notes on what books we're reading, as I can't really recall.

The kids have been reading a bunch of Naruto manga. When we go to the library we pick up 10-12 books at a time.

My own reading has mostly focussed on messing around with the Kindle. These are sort of in order backwards, since the oldest ones are on the last page of the "Home" list, and I'm paging through it to see what I read so far this year.

Talk of the Town by Lisa Wingate. This was a free download, and turned out to be a cute book. Chicklit, predictable, but fun to read while waiting for kids to skate/have a piano lesson/whatever other reason I end up sitting around waiting for someone. I didn't realize Lisa Wingate was an Evangelical writer until I was most of the way through the book -- the Christian point-of-view isn't applied with the usual sledge hammer (and one of the reviewers on Amazon was upset by that, apparently preferring the sledge hammer -- go figure).

Murder Takes the Cake by Gayle Trent. Also a free download at the time. Wooden writing, predictable plotting. Again, it passed the time while I was sitting around waiting for kids to be done with various classes, but I should probably delete it from the Kindle now. The best part was the forward about a cat the author knows.

All God's Creatures by Carolyn McSparren. Another free-at-the-time Kindle download. A novel about a female veterinarian in the southern U.S., this was engaging and interesting. It would actually be worth checking out of the library if you want to read a novel about a vet, perhaps even worth purchasing.

A couple of Star Wars short stories that were free Kindle downloads. After reading them I considered purchasing the novel they were trying to lure me into buying, or at least checking it out it out fo the library. Then I thought about reading hundreds of pages of that sort of prose, and decided against it.

Genie in Your Genes by Dawson Church. I wanted to take a look at this, and the library didn't have it. So I decided to purchase on Kindle because it was slightly cheaper that way. And then spent most of the time reading it thinking about how I wished I had purchased the paper copy, since the Kindle seemed sort of balky for reading nonfiction. For instance, why aren't all the footnote superscript numbers hot links to the actual footnotes? Wouldn't that be handy?* As for actual content of the book, I'm just vaguely aware that I read quite a bit about genes, and that the mechanisms through which those genes are expressed means that Jurassic Park, Maximum Ride, and possibly even Clone Wars are works of fiction. As I said, this reading experience was mostly about wishing I'd chosen a different format for the book. Maybe I'll re-read it later and find out what the book actually said.

*The footnote asterisks in Terry Pratchett's books on Kindle are hotlinks. If they can do it for Terry Pratchett, why can't they do it for nonfixction?

EFT for Procrastination by Gloria Arenson. Also read on the Kindle, this time I got a grip on how to use the bookmarking feature to flip back and forth between bits of the book. As for the actual content, Arenson is a psychotherapist who deals with compulsive behaviors. I now know that procrastination isn't simply a matter of laziness -- there are all sorts of triggers.

I also downloaded a boatload of Kindle previews. They're a few pages of various books I might be interested in purchasing or checking out of the library. Sometimes the preview is enough to see that the book really isn't suited to the Kindle format.

Overall, I'd say I've been reading a lot more since the Kindle debuted in our lives. I can't say that the quality of what I've read has been that great overall. It's certainly handy to carry the Kindle around and pull it out at times when I'd be staring at the wall in boredom (actually that's not true -- I'd be knitting -- sometimes I knit while reading, too -- but you get the point).