Megatheriums for Breakfast

My fortnightly summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

The Jetty Journals by Ian Buchanan

E-book on my iPod.

This is a short novel aimed at teenagers, written by a good friend of mine and now published as an e-book through Smashwords.

Ian sent me an electronic copy of his novel a couple of years ago and urged me to read it; but what with one thing and another I didn’t get around to it. A large part of my reluctance, I think, was just that I hate reading anything of any real length on the computer screen. Reading for pleasure is part of what I call the ‘couch culture’. Reading stuff from the computer screen is part of ‘desk culture’ and too much like hard work.

Anyway, when he let me know that it was available as an e-book in a format suitable for my iPod Touch, I downloaded it and read it with pleasure in a few days.

The book tells the story of a small group of Melbourne teenagers who survive a global pandemic which kills off a very large percentage of the population. Well, it turns out, it didn’t actually kill everyone – some people survive, but unpleasantly changed…

The book is strong on the group’s desperate struggles to survive, and full of local color – set mainly on the Mornington Peninsula which runs along the eastern edge of Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay.

I found it very enjoyable, though I felt the ending was a little incomplete. Ian tells me, though, that he has a sequel in the works, which should satisfy that feeling.

Secret Asset by Stella Rimington

E-book on my iPod.

This is the second novel by the one-time head of Britain’s MI5, and as with her first novel, is full of convincing detail about the management of agents and the investigation of terror threats.

A terrorist plot is detected, but with insufficient information to track down the suspects; an old IRA member lies dying and reveals a secret vulnerability of Britain’s security forces; our heroine Liz Carlyle is delegated to investigate some of her fellow staff, looking for a mole.

I found the ending of this one to be a little unsatisfactory – perhaps not quite credible – as the mole is finally identified, their motivation discovered, and the terrorist plot revealed. But still, good page-turning stuff.

Current Reading

I’m currently part-way through:

• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Hardcover, my own library)
• The Great War – Breakthroughs by Harry Turtledove (Audiobook)
• South by Sir Ernest Shackleton (E-Book)

My fortnightly summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, And the Exploration of the Red Planet  by Steve Squyres

E-book on my iPod.

This was an interesting-enough look at the development of the Mars rovers from the point of view of one of the chief scientists involved. The structure of the book was a bit loose, though, being made up from of a variety of different sources and sets of notes which Squyres made through the long years of development and acceptance of the proposal by NASA through to the launch and successful landing of both rovers. I would have liked more about the actual day to day operation of the rovers on the surface of Mars, I think.

And the e-book is missing the fascinating photographs actually taken by the rovers – all we get is a line drawing of one of the rovers. This is one case where I think I would rather own a ‘dead-tree’ version of the book. I’m guessing that many non-fiction works are going to suffer in the same way on the iPhone/Touch – though they might be fine on the Kindle or Sony Reader.

A Sleeping Life  by Ruth Rendell

E-book on my iPod.

Another in Rendell’s series about Chief Inspector Wexford. Here the mystery revolves around the life of the victim – an unknown middle-aged woman found stabbed in Kingsbridge. The mystery is not so much about the murder but about who this woman was and what kind of a life she had been living.

While entertaining enough, I guessed the solution of the mystery when I was only about half-way through the book, which spoilt it a little for me, though I kept reading to see how it all panned out. Not Rendell’s best book, but well worth reading anyway.

Musicophilia  by Oliver Sacks

Hardcover, from the library

Sacks continues to write fascinating stuff about the human brain and the human mind. If you haven’t read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat you must!

While this work isn’t quite so varied and entertaining, it is still absorbing reading. Sacks focuses on how music seems deeply embedded into the human brain, and the various conditions which can occur when things go wrong (or right!) with these regions of the brain. His discussion of the plight of those suffering Williams-Beuren syndrome, in which a sequence of genes has been omitted on one chromosome, is absolutely fascinating and moving. Such people are, by ‘normal’ standards, intellectually severely disabled; but their ‘musical intelligence’ can be astonishing and their musical skills very striking.

Sacks also discusses in some detail how music can liberate or transform the lives of those with a variety of different neurological problems, from patients with Parkinsonism, through Tourettes sufferers, to those who have had strokes.
I have learnt a good deal both about music and about the brain from this book.

Current Reading

I’m currently part-way through:

• The Great War – Breakthroughs by Harry Turtledove (Audiobook)
  (I’ve finished the previous volumes of this trilogy, but will wait until I’ve finished the whole series before reviewing it here)
• Secret Asset by Stella Rimington (E-Book)
• South by Sir Ernest Shackleton (E-Book)

My fortnightly summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

Boy, a fortnight comes around quickly! Never mind, let’s see what’s been going on.

The Pillars of the Earth  by Ken Follett.

E-book on my iPod.

See here for my take on what it was like to read such a long book on the iPod Touch.

Setting aside how I read this book, I should say that I found this long historical novel very entertaining and enjoyable. Certainly a departure for an author formerly known as being the writer of best-selling thrillers.

It follows a small cast of characters who become involved in the building of a new cathedral in England during the 12th Century. The historical backdrop is the civil war between the supporters of the rival contenders for the throne, Stephen and Maud. Those who are familiar with the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters will be familiar with the bones of this part of English history.

Follett succeeds in bringing out how uncertain and dangerous life was during this time. We follow the fortunes, among others, of a mason and his family; the daughter of an ousted earl; the prior of a monastery; and the sullen, violent son of a nobleman. There are terrible, violent crimes; two or more love stories; betrayals and reversals of fortune. Yet they all knit easily together in the story, which is gripping.

Follett makes no attempt to suggest the use of the language which would have been in use at the time; everyone speaks and thinks in essentially modern English. That’s all fine, and to be expected (think of it as a translation no less than would be a translation from French to English). But there are times when the reader wonders if the thinking patterns of the characters would be quite so recognizably modern as the author makes them out to be.

There’s also the occasional outright anachronism. For example, I doubt whether anyone at the time would have described the shape of a castle’s fortifications as being like ‘a figure eight’ – Arabic numerals (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) weren’t adopted in the West until well after this date. But this is mere pettifogging pendantry on my part.

Well worth reading. I plan on tackling the equally long sequel, World Without End, set two centuries later, sometime soon.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom  by Cory Doctorow.

E-book on my iPod.

This is a free e-book, made available by the author under a Creative Commons license. (Though, interestingly, you can still buy it from Fictionwise for $13.95 if you want to support the author).

It’s quite a short novel – Doctorow’s first – but fizzing with ideas, and an enjoyable read.

I read it specifically to find out about the respect-based economy he postulates, because I’m intending to research and write about such systems here in the future. I was a little disappointed in this goal, since the book really doesn’t explore much about how such a system would work in practice, or how it would evolve – it’s merely a fait accompli when the book opens.

I enjoyed much more the concept of the end of death by means of the ability to save a complete “back-up” of one’s mind at any time, and then have this backup restored into a new, cloned body, at a later time if your current body dies. It throws a whole new importance on the dictum “back up often“, since, obviously, you lose that whole part of your memories experienced since the last back-up. Fascinating idea, and used very well as part of the plot. But it’s perhaps a pity that Doctorow didn’t explore some of the same territory as Algis Budrys in Rogue Moon about whether identity would truly be preserved by such a process.

But these are quibbles. The story was engaging, the locale amusing (the historically preserved Disneyland in Florida), and the characters, though a little shallow, worth following. As a first novel, it is really very impressive, and I’ll go looking for Doctorow’s other works.

Full points to Doctorow, by the way, for campaigning against the corporate lock-up of copyright as a legal tool, and for putting his money where his mouth is and making many of his works available under Creative Commons licenses.

Current Reading

I’m currently part way through:

• The Great War – Walk in Hell by Harry Turtledove (audiobook)
• Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks (hardback, from library)
• A Sleeping Life by Ruth Rendell (e-book)

I’ve just finished reading Ken Follett’s massive historical novel, The Pillars of the Earth, and enjoyed it greatly. It’s a gripping saga of love and hate, emnity and friendship, ambition and humility surrounding the building of a cathedral in 12th Century England.

As I say, it’s a massive book: 973 pages in the hardcover version, two and a half inches thick, weighing about three pounds. Pretty hard to hold in the hand, or even to read in bed. A real pain to lug around on the train or the bus.

That’s the hardcover, of course, but the paperback isn’t much better, still weighing over two pounds, and two inches thick.

Yet the version that I read weighed only about four ounces and was so small that I could slip it into my pocket, carry it everywhere and could read it any time I had a few minutes to spare.

I read it as an e-book on my iPod Touch, of course.

I must confess that I hesitated a long while before buying The Pillars of the Earth from Fictionwise; it seemed slightly insane to attempt to read a nearly 1000-page book on the small iPod screen. But after a while, I gave in. After the “Micropay Rebate” which Fictionwise offers, it cost me less than $5. Half a cent a page seemed a pretty good deal!

After it was installed on my iPod it looked even more daunting. At the font size which I find comfortable, eReader told me that the book was some 3,332 pages (screens?) long. I was going to have to tap my iPod screen at least that many times. Wouldn’t that get exhausting?

The iPhone / iPod Touch is often denigrated as an e-book reader (particularly by Kindle fans) because of the small form factor of the screen. They certainly have a point when discussing newspapers and magazines or textbooks with formulas, illustrations and diagrams. But I think they miss the point when it comes to novels or even general non-fiction books. The fact is that for such books the form factor is close to irrelevant.

All that is needed for comfortable reading is an easily readable font size and style and enough words on the screen that you can read and grasp a typical paragraph or two at a time. Once immersed in the story, your brain stops paying attention to how the story is being delivered to it. Well, that is what I have found, anyway.

The Pillars of the Earth has been treated well in the conversion by Fictionwise. The structure of prologue, parts and chapters is all respected; and each major part has an attractive illustration which displays neatly on the iPod screen. It was, really, a delight to read. I wasn’t counting screen taps – after all, who counts the number of page turns you make when reading a hardcopy book? And I could take it with me all the time and read it whenever I had the urge and the opportunity.

Then I thought of an interesting connection in reading this particular book – much of it set in a mediaeval monastery where monks labour over their copying desks. I remembered an exhibition I went to last year at our State Library – a collection of beautiful mediaeval manuscripts. These gorgeous books came in all sizes – from the huge Bibles intended for use on a lectern, to the tiny Book of Hours which could be easily slipped into a sleeve or pocket.

While the screen of the iPod Touch in the eReader application doesn’t look as splendid as the beautifully illustrated Book of Hours, in terms of the number of words per page, it does pretty well, as the following comparison shows.