Once upon a time there was a TV called Firefly, which was cancelled toward the end of the first season. And lo! It had many, many fans, some of whom are known to read this weblog. And in the days that followed the cancellation, it was proposed that a series of novels should be written, carrying the story forward. And lo! An author was chosen, and the first novel was begun.

But it was not to be. The money failed, and the series of novels was abandoned. But the author, whose name was (and is) Steven Brust, completed the first novel anyway, and released it into the Creative Commons. And lo! It is called My Own Kind of Freedom, and it is available at FeedBooks.com. And there was great rejoicing.

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For those who’ve seen the series: the book takes place some time after Shepherd Book leaves the Serenity but before the events of the movie with the same name. And Brust got the tone exactly right; the novel reads like an extended episode of the TV show. If you’re a fan, you should look it up.

I wanted to like this book, but I didn’t. I intended to finish, but got stranded about three-quarters of the way through, and haven’t managed to pick it up again.

I don’t mean to say that it’s a bad book; I’m not at all sure that it is. (I’ll come back to that.) But it doesn’t work for me. I am not in its target audience. (I’ll come back to that, too.)

I picked up the book because of its author and because of its topic.

Kathleen Norris is an oddity, a Presbyterian who is an Oblate of St. Benedictine, that is to say, a Lay Benedictine as I hope one day to be a Lay Dominican. She’s written about this in an earlier book, The Cloister Walk, which I’ve run into frequent mentions of and which I glanced at last year when I was reading about St. Benedict and his order. It’s one of those books that’s been on my list to think about buying someday, maybe.

Then I ran into this book at the bookstore, and the topic grabbed me: “acedia”. This word, seldom encountered these days, is usually translated “sloth”–another word that is seldom encountered these days. I gather that practically speaking there’s a distinction between the two words that is frequently lost. In any event, it’s a word I’d encountered a number of times in the past year, most recently in Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture, and I was curious to find out more about it.

Norris’ book begins with the following vivid passage from Evagrius, one of the ancient monks of the desert:

The demon of acedia–also called the noonday demon–is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. He presses his attack upon the monk about the fourth hour and besieges the soul until the eighth hour. First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour (or lunchtime), to look this way and now that to see if perhaps [one of the brethren appears from his cell].

The passage continues with details that are less applicable to those who aren’t monks…but replace the words “cell” and “brethren” in the above with “office” and “co-worker” and suddenly it strikes uncomfortably close to home.

So I was interested in what Norris has to say. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out so well in practice.

First, much of the book is autobiographical. The autobiographical material is intended to illustrate the points she’s making, but for me its volume tends to obscure them. Perhaps if I had read Norris’ previous books, and been more interested in her as a person, I’d have this material more interesting.

Second, Norris is a poet. To my shame, I have very little taste or patience for serious poetry; when I see verse I usually skim over it (unless I think it’s likely to be funny). And then, as Norris herself says, she’s not about making distinctions–and I’ve been spending the last year reading philosophy. I think one might fairly say that it is the philosopher’s job to make fine distinctions between things that are similar and the poet’s job to draw similarities between things that are completely distinct. I tend not to trust poets, perhaps for this reason, and in any event it means that Norris’ method is muddying the waters for me rather than clarifying things.

Finally, as I indicated above, I don’t think I’m in Norris’ target audience. She seems to be writing for people who are familiar with the language of psychology and psychotherapy, and who tend to think of life in those terms. She spends a great deal of time drawing a line (ironically, making a distinction) between the psychological condition of depression and the moral condition of acedia, trying to make it clear that these are two different things, and that the moral and spiritual order does not reduce to the psychological order. She’s right, of course. They are not equivalent; growing in holiness, and in the knowledge and love of God, is distinct from growing in mental health.

The difficult here, for me, is that I don’t tend to see things in psychological terms. I also don’t tend to presume that personal problems are largely of psychological origin and can be combatted through therapy, which appears to me to be the position that Norris is arguing against. I think that most people are more or less normal, and that psychotherapy is more or less irrelevant to most of them. (Please note, I’m not discounting mental illness, here; I just don’t think it’s a good way of viewing the world.)

So as I say, this book wasn’t written for me, and it doesn’t work for me, and that’s a pity, because so far as I can understand what Norris is getting at she seems to be on the right track. Oh, well.

So I ordered myself an Amazon Kindle book reader some while back, and it arrived in the mail yesterday. Here are some scattered impressions, in no particular order.

The pictures of the Kindle on the Amazon website do not do the unit justice. They make it look like a big white chunk of cheap plastic; it’s much more attractive and pleasant to hold than I would have guessed. It’s still not entirely lovely; I’m reminded of the first generation iPods.

The screen is surprisingly pleasant to look at. It uses something called “electric paper”; power is consumed only when the page is updated. It’s a reflective screen, like the page of a normal book, which is a good thing, on the whole. You need to sit where there’s light for reading, which is no problem, and you can actually read it outdoors, even in bright sunlight. At least, so I’m given to understand–that part I’ve not had the opportunity to try for myself. I could wish for a little more contrast between the text and the background, but on the whole the display is very nice.

There’s an annoying flash when you go to the next page; it’s as though the foreground and the background inverts for a moment. And turning the page takes a noticeable amount of time. The flash and the lag bothered me a lot at first, but I find that I’ve almost stopped noticing it, any more than I notice the paper moving or the time it takes to turn a page in a real book.

There are a number of interactive features, including (of course) the ability to buy e-books from Amazon, and to manage the content on the Kindle itself. The interface is better than I’d feared, and not as good as it could be, but it’s usable. The big issue is the speed of screen updates, which are too slow for fancy interactive graphics. There’s no notion of a mouse pointer; instead, there’s a strip of (I assume) LCD along the right-hand side of the display; a little scroll wheel moves a silver rectangle called the cursor up and down it. This allows you to select individual lines or menu items in the display. It’s limited, but they’ve made surprisingly good use of it. A neat feature is that the height of the cursor grows and shrinks to match the size of the thing being selected.

The slowness of the screen updates works in the Kindle’s favor in at least one respect. Scrolling the text simply won’t work; it would be way too slow. Consequently, the text is presented in pages, and you step forward and backward by page. This makes reading a book on the Kindle much more like reading a real book, and more pleasant than reading e-books in a web browser. This is enhanced by the position of the Next Page/Previous Page buttons on the sides of the units, as the pages seem to move from right to left as you read the book, rather than from top to bottom.

That said, it’s a little too easy to press the Next Page/Previous Page buttons when handling the unit. (Everybody says this, I gather.)

The wireless capabilities work as advertised. I bought a couple of books from the Amazon Kindle store, and they were downloaded to the Kindle in next to no time over “WhisperNet”, which is a data network running on Sprint’s EVDO cell phone network. Every Kindle has its own e-mail address; you can e-mail documents in a variety of formats to that address, and Amazon will convert them automatically to Kindle format and send them to your Kindle. I tried this with a Word document and an HTML document; both showed up on the Kindle without further ado. I also downloaded a Project Gutenberg text of Dicken’s Bleak House in Kindle format from ManyBooks.net and copied it to the Kindle from my laptop using the supplied USB cable. That also worked flawlessly.

You can highlight passages in any book you’re reading, which works fairly well so long as you remember that you’re highlighting lines, not phrases. You can also add short annotations using the Kindle’s built-in keyboard, which is a QWERTY keyboard designed for two-thumb typing, rather like a Blackberry or various smartphones. It’s not quick (for me, at least) but it works.

The unit comes with an attractive leather “book cover” which protects the screen; I’d have no qualms tossing the Kindle into a bag or backpack provided that I used the cover. The cover also makes the Kindle easier to hold when you’re reading. On the other hand, it makes it hard to do the two-thumb typing thing.

The software includes a simple web browser, suitable for browsing “mobile” web content; it’s slow, thanks mostly to the screen update rate…but on the other hand, it’s really easy to search Wikipedia anywhere you’ve got a cellphone signal. Way cool. It also has a built-in dictionary. You can click on any line in a book, and it will present you with definitions for the significant words on the line.

On the whole, I’m favorably impressed. There’s room for improvement in both the hardware and the software, but on the whole the unit is the nicest environment for reading e-books I’ve yet come across.