I'm Back.

So what could possibly bring me back to this neglected blog? A few things, but mostly a certain exciting announcement by Apple today.

I have been enjoying my tumblr, but it works more as an online scrapbook than actual blog. It feels off to post personal things there instead of photos or quotes, so "Marvelous Things" wins that battle.

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Today, Apple announced its latest product, the iPad. All inappropriate jokes about the name aside, it looks relatively intriguing.

Pluses:
1. Very low price point. Even if the cheapest option at $499 has no 3G, it's still pretty impressive.
2. It can run pre-existing iPhone apps AND they don't need to be re-purchased.
3. Accessories available include a full keyboard and stand, which would be essential.

Cons:
1. Too small and too square. It doesn't even run widescreen video!
2. Unless you're using a stand/dock, it seems really awkward to hold, especially for typing. The angle would be wonky if it was place on a flat surface and typing on your lap, especially while in a car or a train, would be clumsy as well.

Now, the kicker: will this replace the Kindle? It does read books, and very elegantly. The page-turning action is quite nice. Still, it loses in the eBook reader world in one major respect: it's an LCD, not an eink screen. Therefore, it won't work well in the sunlight and it will tire out your eyes after a while. In addition, it looks like the price point for new books will be $12.99-$14.99, versus Amazon's general under-$9.99 price point.

Giles isn't going anywhere. Besides my enjoyment of the device's UI, I've already invested in books from Amazon (though I do get the majority of my books for free, since a lot of them are classics or just public domain). It would take a lot more from Apple to make me switch eReaders. The iPad seems fine for a more casual reader, but it is not a great device for those who intend to do a LOT of electronic reading.

I can't get over how great it is to use the Kindle for both pleasure/free-time reading and assignments for class. Here is its current state, by the way -- I acquired a skin to improve the pasty white border:



and this is the lovely Oberon cover I got for Christmas:



I will be curious to follow the iPad's progress and see how many Apple actually sells. For now, I won't be investing.

But Where Are The Pages? Some Thoughts on the Kindle & the Impending Apocalypse

This is my Kindle. Its name is Giles (yes, named after that Giles).

First, a bit of background information. I have loved books for the majority of my life (ever since I muddled out how the alphabet worked at a young age). I have read ebooks for about five years now, off-and-on. The platforms on which I have read ebooks are the Palm Zire 71 (what a great PDA that was!), my computer, and this summer, my iPod Touch. None of those reading experiences are comparable to the Kindle, as I will explain.

Most people have one of two reactions to the Kindle: 1) That's amazing! How cool! OR 2) What have you done and why do you want to invoke the end times? There's a sense of outrage, as if by purchasing a dedicated ebook reader, I wish to burn the rain forest and oh yeah, burn the Library of Alexandria again. That is errant nonsense. My commitment to the written word (no matter the manifestation) is why I purchased a Kindle. How can I resist a device that allows me to carry a library wherever I go?

Reading on a Kindle is neither like reading on a computer nor on a PDA. Computers and PDAs and iPhones are light-emitting devices; read on one for a while and then experience that fabulous sinus-shattering feeling from staring at a screen too long. The Kindle's display is electronic ink: that's why it works beautifully in direct sunlight and why reading it at night requires a light source. There's no glare, no dim reflection of your face (and glasses) on the screen. In short, it looks just like paper.

But neither is it like reading the fancy, leather-bound edition of your favourite book. The Kindle doesn't have gilded edges or a ribbon bookmark or a hand-cut bookplate in the front with your name on it. It does have the magic of always remembering your place in the book; the convenience of a built-in dictionary; the charming screensaver images of famous authors and the occasional woodcut or medieval manuscript image when the screen goes to sleep; and the ease of downloading books wirelessly from the internet.

One of the delights about the Kindle is that is does only one thing well: reading. The web browser is amusing to use, as if an abacus had ambitions to become a TI-83 Plus. It's fine for a quick Wikipedia search, but I'd much rather browse the web from my iPod or laptop. The best function on the Kindle is reading itself, not mobile web browsing, but the act of turning (electronic) pages. Such simplicity encourages healthy, productive unitasking, as others have noted. If the web browser were better, I would be tempted to go back and forth from email to books to blogs to websites. As it is, I easily become engrossed whatever text I am reading.

Not everyone loves the Kindle. That's fine with me. And I have my own issues with the device, above all the utter lack of shelves or folders to organize books. However, for now, it's an amazing solution that allows me to carry many books with me everywhere, and that's a wonder to behold.

BBC Meme

Oh memes. I usually ignore them, but this one was too fun (got a link to it via Facebook). It's a booklist, ostensibly from the BBC, though I have my doubts.

"The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Add a '- ' to the ones you HATE.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

I'm also going to put an * by the ones I plan to read.

Then tag however many people you want and read their responses:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x +
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x +
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x +
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x +
6 The Bible x +
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x +
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (some, not all of them) x +
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x+
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x +
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger x +
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot *
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams x +
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh x +
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x +
34 Emma - Jane Austen x +
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen x +
36 The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood x +
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan *
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel x -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons *
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x +
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens *
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt x
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas x
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac *
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding x
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville x
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker x
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x +
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath *
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt *
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x +
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas *
98 Beloved - Toni Morrison
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo x +

Total read: 49


OK. This list looks rather uneven to me. What is The Five People You Meet in Heaven doing next to Sherlock Holmes? I'm getting flashbacks to the Humanities curriculum, which seemed to think five female authors sufficient for a two-year study of literature and history. Anyway. I do have a quite a few classics to read still!

New Year, New Pictures

Ah, the first post of 2009! How very exciting. I have great hopes for 2009 to be a most excellent year.

I've been keeping busy during the holidays with trips hither and yon and much time spent knitting. There are many new photos up on Flickr from Brussels, Brugge, Amsterdam, Villers Abbey, and the continuous production of knitted items.

The new semester will start in a few days and then I'll back in the swing of things. I do plan on taking more pictures of Tours, though, as I've not posted many pictures of the city itself (besides the Loire, of course). The Cathedral is absolutely lovely, so perhaps I will do a little photoshoot around there.

In other news, I've become enthralled by GoodReads. For those of you who are not familiar with it, it's a book website that allows you to list books that you have read, hope to read, or are currently reading. It's a bit shameful to see just how many books I have in the works right now, but also extremely handy since I am always reading about new books to try. It's a convenient place to keep the future books list, and it's fun to see what other people are currently reading.

Harry Potter Lives On Forever

NB: This post is dedicated to my younger siblings, who share in my joy for this series. I love you both!

It's not hard to figure out via context clues and my obsessive ramblings, that I adore the Harry Potter books. Not everyone understand this, which I can appreciate. Still, there are many that shared my sadness when the series concluded a little over a year ago.

So, when J.K. Rowling announced the publication of a new book, The Tales of Beedle the Bard (which figured prominently in the last book of the series), I was among those rejoicing. But wait! I'm abroad! How will I ever find this lovely text in this strange and foreign land?

Fear not! A few weeks ago I read in the promotional newsletter for my favourite bookstore, La Boîte à Livres (the box of boxes) that I could expect to see Les Contes de Beedle le Barde very soon! Therefore, I went and obtained my very own copy today. I haven't started reading it yet -- I am going to try to really stretch it out.

Here is the lovely cover:



I adore the design and layout -- old-school is the way to go. J.K. Rowling did the illustrations inside as well, but I am not photographing those because everyone should go find a copy in a local bookstore to enjoy the surprise.

Of course, I am very excited about eventually getting the English version too and comparing the two editions. In reading the original series in French, I pick up on slight translational liberties.