I got my Kindle from Amazon about two weeks ago; and darn it, it works!. When I’m sitting in a comfy chair, I can lose myself in it just like I can in a printed book, something that seldom happens when I’m reading something on the laptop screen. And reading on the Kindle has some advantages over printed books. Being rigid, it’s easier to prop up on the kitchen table, and it doesn’t flop closed if I take my hand away. The search feature makes it easier to remember just who minor character Jones is, and why he’s important. And if I highlight an interesting quote, it’s much easier to find it for later use.

As witness, here are some of the books I’ve read on the Kindle since I got it.

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens: I’m not much of a Dickens fan, but over the last several months I’d run across a number of mentions of how delightful Bleak House is, a description I never would have guessed from the title. I downloaded it for free from FeedBooks.com, and gave it a spin. Dickens had me in the first paragraph:

Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

The book’s almost a thousand pages long, and I devoured it over the course of the following week. And, come to think of it, I’ve got too much to say about it for an omnibus review like this, so I’ll move along.

The Skylark of Space and Skylark 3, by E.E. “Doc” Smith: I downloaded these, both of which I’d read years ago, from FeedBooks.com and ManyBooks.net respectively. These two sites both draw from Project Gutenberg, and consequently have similar selections; however, the folks at FeedBooks appear to put more effort into producing an attractive product. On the other hand, I found Skylark 3 at the latter but not at the former.

Anyway, these books are classic tales of Space Opera and Super Science, and if I can’t take them at all seriously at least they are good fun. Or mostly good fun; it’s interesting to see how attitudes have changed since the 1920’s, when these were written. There’s a casual acceptance of both eugenics and genocide (fiendish alien race; universe not big enough for both of us) that would be unthinkable following WWII.

I also notice that all of Smith’s heroes in these books (and in his others that I’ve dipped into) are flawless physical and mental specimens. It’s not enough that Dick Seaton, super-scientist of the Skylark series, is a super-scientist; he also has to be one of the best tennis players and fastest shots in the country. Wishful thinking, anyone?

Update: These freely available e-books derive from the original magazine publications; they are not identical to the novels published with these titles. I glanced at a printed copy of Skylark of Valeron a couple of days ago; it’s the second of the novels, but its opening scene would be somewhere in the middle of the e-text of Skylark 3, if it were included at all, which it isn’t. It appears to me that the first three of the printed Skylark novels cover approximately the same ground as these two e-books, with lots of additional material.

Slan, by A.E. Van Vogt: I recently decided to give Van Vogt a try, having not read much of his work, and found this in Kindle Store. It’s an edition prepared by an outfit called Rosetta Books, which evidently specializes in producing and selling electronic editions of older books that are still in copyright. Peace be upon them, but I have to say that the frequency of typographical errors was unpleasantly high.

Be that as it may, Slan is the story of a young lad, Jommy Cross, who isn’t fully human. Rather, he’s a “slan,” a member of a new race, descended from humans, but with greatly enhanced faculties. Slan can read minds, are stronger than humans, and much smarter. They are also forced to live in hiding, because the vast mass of humanity hates them.

The book is interesting from a historical point of view, especially after reading the first couple of Skylark books: Dick Seaton is (minus the mind-reading capability) more or less a slan. The action kept me reading, and some bits are really good. But Van Vogt’s dialog is just awful, and the book ends with a most implausible info-dump. In short, I didn’t buy it.

But on the other hand, it was entertaining enough, and it cost me less than a printed copy would have. So what’s to complain about?

The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman: Here’s a delightfully odd outing by Gaiman, intended for middle readers, about a boy who grows up in a graveyard, raised by ghosts and other denizens of the night. The boy’s family is murdered in the opening chapter, to some fell purpose, but the boy escapes and is taken in by a kindly shade. Ultimately, of course, the boy learns why his family was killed, and rejoins the living world.

The immediate inspiration for the book was, oddly enough, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, hence the title.

The book is illustrated, and the illustrations were included in the Kindle edition, but as it’s only four-level grayscale they weren’t all that clear and I didn’t spend much time looking at them.

This is probably the time to mention a minor detail about the Kindle that I find absolutely charming. The Kindle has a sleep mode that you use when you’re not actually reading; it saves power, and also ensures that pages don’t get turned accidently when you’re carrying the Kindle about in backpack or purse. And when the Kindle is sleeping, it pops up an image on the display, one of a large set of classic engravings, wood-cuts, and so forth that were chosen to take best advantage of the Kindle’s four-level grayscale display. The images are cool, and my only wish is that there were more of them.

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.

* * * * *

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.

A reader writes:

On November 10th, The Institute for the Future of the Book kicks off an experiment in close reading. Seven women will read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and carry on a conversation in the margins. The idea for the project arose out of my experience re-reading the novel in the summer of 2007 just before Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Golden Notebook was one of the two or three most influential books of my youth and I decided I wanted to “try it on” again after so many years. It turned out to be one of the most interesting reading experiences of my life. With an interval of thirty-seven years the lens of perception was so different; things that stood out the first-time around were now of lesser importance, and entire themes I missed the first time came front and center. When I told my younger colleagues what I was reading, I was surprised that not one of them had read it, not even the ones with degrees in English literature. It occurred to me that it would be very interesting to eavesdrop on a conversation between two readers, one under thirty, one over fifty or sixty, in which they react to the book and to each other’s reactions. And then of course I realized that we now actually have the technology to do just that. Thanks to the efforts of Chris Meade, my colleague and director of if:book London, the Arts Council England enthusiastically and generously agreed to fund the project. Chris was also the link to Doris Lessing who through her publisher HarperCollins signed on with the rights to putting the entire text of the novel online.

Fundamentally this is an experiment in how the web might be used as a space for collaborative close-reading. We don’t yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web’s two-dimensional environment and we’re hoping this experiment will help us learn what’s necessary to make this sort of collaboration work as well as possible. In addition to making comments in the margin, we expect that the readers will also record their reactions to the process in a group blog. In the public forum, everyone who is reading along and following the conversation can post their comments on the book and the process itself.

I’m writing you now with the hope that you will help spread the word to everyone who might be interested in following along and participating in the forum discussions.

p.s. One last note. This is not essentially an experiment in online reading itself. Although the online version of the text is quite readable, for now, we believe books made of paper still have a substantial advantage over the screen for sustained reading of a linear narrative. So you may also want to suggest to your readers that they order copies of the book now. Whichever edition of the book someone reads (US, UK or online), there is a navigation bar at the top of the online page will help locate them within the conversation.

The experiment is taking place at TheGoldenNotebook.org. I don’t know anything about the book, or about Doris Lessing, for that matter, except that one book of hers I read in college (A Briefing for a Descent into Hell) I seriously disliked. Your mileage may vary.

I’d been wanting to read this book for a while, as it has gotten good reviews at Happy Catholic, among other places. The subject matter (it’s a fantasy novel) is right up my street, and in addition, the author is a member in good standing of the Catholic blogosphere, which I’m inclined to support. I finally found a copy in a book store in Kansas City while I was on a business trip last week, and read it mostly on the plane on the way home.

Auralia’s Colors is the first book in a series; the second book, Cyndere’s Midnight, is already out. It takes place in a region known to its inhabitants as The Expanse. The people who live in The Expanse came there from the North at some point in the indefinite past, as refugees from…something. They gathered in four groups, and built four cities, which they call Houses. The Houses are greatly separated from one another, with vast tracts of uninhabited territory in between. There’s a certain amount of contact between them, but The Expanse is mostly unpeopled.

The present story takes place in and around House Abascar, a walled city in which all of the common folk have been forced to give up all colors other than grey and white and black and brown for the glory of the greedy Queen Jaralaine. Beastmen prowl the nearby forests, and so all law-abiding “Housefolk” live within the walls of House Abascar. Law-breakers are forced to live outside the walls as “Gatherers”, who must hunt animals and gather wild fruits and vegetables to feed the people of the house.

Into this world comes a baby girl, left on the bank of the river, a girl who cannot help seeing colors everywhere, and making fine things out of them. She is raised by the Gatherers, as all orphans are, but she grows wild and free, and soon enough comes into conflict with the soldiers of the King, and with his son, Prince Cal-Raven.

There’s a lot here to like; this isn’t your typical pseudo-medieval-European politics-and-intrigue-driven epic fantasy. The author is trying to say some interesting things about the nature of beauty, about settling for too little in the name of security, about being open to the glory of God. (Though, as a proper Christian fantasy in the tradition of Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories, the book isn’t overtly Christian at all.)

Still, my reaction was mixed. Before I say why, I need to make a disclaimer. My business trip last week was extremely productive and useful, but very draining: I was basically in over-drive for two days. Flying home, I was tired (more tired than I realized) and grumpy, and just trying to get through the flight. I found myself having to push myself through the book, rather than letting it carry me. This might have been the fault of the book; or it might simply have been the half-alert state I found myself in. I’m inclined to give Mr. Overstreet the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t really know. Anyway, on to more serious criticisms.

There are two ways to write fantasy, which I’ll call the realistic way, and the fabulous way. The Lord of the Rings is an example of the first, as is George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones and its sequels. The world presented by the book is intended to be taken as real. Its laws may be different than those of our world, but it is meant to be internally consistent and as real to its inhabitants as ours is to us. Most of the fantasy novels I’ve read have been in this vein. The fabulous way is less often attempted, and seems to be much harder to do. Examples would include Tolkien’s own Smith of Wooton Major, and Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Books in this vein are not allegories, but everything in them is freighted with meaning, and with mystery. Everything in them seems to glow, as though the people and places and other creatures are merely stand-ins for something much bigger and grander that is always in danger of breaking through.

I suppose one could further break the fabulous into two subcategories, those in which that deeper, grander world is really there, and those in which it’s simply an illusion. Michael Moorcock, for example, is a master at linking his books together with references and allusions that create the impression of a much larger world, when it’s really all just sleight of hand. But I digress.

My main criticism of Auralia’s Colors is that it doesn’t quite succeed in either mode. It doesn’t succeed as a realistic fantasy: I simply can’t buy House Abascar as a going concern. Most of the people live within the walls, but all of the food, apparently, is produced by a small village of Gatherers. The level of technology seems way out of proportion to the size of the population consistent with this food supply. Queen Jaralaine travels with a small retinue to a distant House, and returns unnoticed by the Captain of the Guard; how? How did she get there? How did she get back? And how (given the walls) could it have gone unnoticed?

If the author was trying to write in the realistic mode, then he’ll have answers to all of these objections, I feel sure. Perhaps there are large gardens and fields within the walls, for example (though at least once Prince Cal-Raven indicates that their food comes from the Gatherers). But the cues that would have encouraged such a view are missing.

My conjecture, however, is that the author was pursuing the fabulous; his themes and plot and background almost require it. But his storytelling is too realistic to support this. To make the fabulous work (I am trying to express ideas I only dimly understand, here) you need a certain distance, a certain veil of formality, between the reader and the characters. In this regard, Auralia and the other characters are almost too vivid, too down-to-earth. They are too much themselves to be archetypes.

Or so it seems to me; your mileage may vary.

I was sufficiently intrigued (and, in spots, moved) that I plan to take a look at Cyndere’s Midnight; but I think Mr. Overstreet can do better.