Megatheriums for Breakfast

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.

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

Again, although I’ve been reading a fair bit over the last fortnight, I have completed very little in the period, in fact, only one book.

Last time I also complained about a change Lexcycle had made to their e-book reader Stanza. They’ve now fixed it; or at least, made it possible to adjust the delay before bringing up their new Dictionary feature. The problem for them is that in the interval I explored the Palm eReader app from Fictionwise and have decided that I like it more. I may do a comparative review of the two pieces of software shortly here or on www.Teleread.org, a great site I recently discovered which deals with news and opinion about e-books.

I’m also uneasy that Lexcycle have now been bought out by Amazon, producers of the Kindle and also owners of Audible. What this means for the future of e-books, I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s good and I am rather concerned. More on this another time.

In what follows and in all my writings about audiobooks, the word ‘read’ also includes the sense ‘listened to’. Pity there’s no English word which covers both.

Trunk Music  by Michael Connelly.

Audiobook from Audible.

I’ve been reading and enjoying the series of novels based around Connelly’s hard-boiled L.A. cop Harry (Hieronymous) Bosch for several years now. The problem is that, what with getting hold of them erratically either from the local library or as they are made available via Audible (or not, see my post Divide and Conquer), I’ve read them completely out of sequence, which has made my understanding of the life-story of Bosch a backwards-and-forwards kind of thing, making me feel a bit like Vonnegut’s character Billy Pilgrim who ‘had come unstuck in time’.

However you piece together Harry Bosch’s story, he’s a fascinating character who seems generally on the side of the good guys, but has an occasional unpleasantly violent streak and a strong tendency to break the rules and go his own way.

Connelly’s stories about Bosch are full of lots of local L.A. detail which I can only presume to be authentic (never having been to that city). And he certainly knows how to spin a yarn.

This one starts with the discovery of an abandoned Rolls Royce with a body in the boot, and the trail leads to organised crime figures in Los Vegas. Typically, however, that’s not where the story ends, as Bosch both tries to unravel the details and to cope with his re-encounter with an old flame.

It’s this relationship which threw me into Billy Pilgrim territory, because I’ve read later novels in the series where this relationship has developed in an unexpected direction, and I feel I’m still missing several pieces of the jigsaw.

I highly recommend “Trunk Music” and the rest of the Bosch series, though with a warning that you have to have to occasionally have a strong stomach for violence and descriptions of gore.

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

While I’ve been reading a fair bit over the last fortnight, I haven’t completed very much in the period.

I’m part way through:

• Trunk Music by Michael Connelly (Audible audiobook)
• The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (Ebook on my iPod)
• Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol I by Edward Gibbon (Ebook on my iPod)

I confess that I’m reading Gibbon’s massive treatise on the iPod just to prove that it can be done, and how well the iPod Touch/iPhone works as an ebook reading platform, something I’m growing increasingly to believe. Even Gibbon’s extensive footnotes work pretty well thanks to intelligent formatting by Gutenberg (from where I sourced the book).

On the down-side, Lexcycle, who produce the Stanza ebook software I had been using to read books on my iPod, dropped the ball. They released a new version incorporating a dictionary lookup feature which manages to interfere with the comfort of reading (the feature pops up if your finger dwells a fraction of a second too long on the screen when you are turning pages). They have promised to fix it, but in the meantime I’m using the almost-as-good eReader from Palm.

Friend of the Devil  by Peter Robinson.

Ebook on my iPod Touch.

I grew up in what is now West Yorkshire in the United Kingdom. Robinson was born not far away from where I was born, and only a year before me. His series of novels about Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks are all set in this part of the world, so many of the places he writes about are quite familiar to me from my childhood. This, of course, adds to the interest I have in this series.

But even if you don’t know this area of the world, DCI Banks is an engaging and multi-layered character with a complex private life, and the cases he encounters are full of interest and mystery. In this novel, the 17th in the series, a young woman is raped and murdered in the town of Eastvale; and in what seems a completely different case, a woman quadriplegic is found murdered in her wheelchair at the top of a set of cliffs facing over the North Sea. How these two cases – one handled by Banks, one by his colleague and ex-lover Annie Cabot – are related only becomes clear as the book progresses. A really intriguing read, and the ending was not at all obvious for almost all of the book.

Various Blogs

Here are some links to a few of the blogs I read regularly:

Coding Horror  by Jeff Atwood

This is always must-read stuff for me. Jeff Atwood talks intelligently and interestingly about the craft of programming, and continually introduces me to new thoughts, and links to things I ought to know or to think about.

I, Cringely  by Robert X. Cringely

Cringely wrote one of the best, and funniest, books about the early days of the computer industry which I have ever read: Accidental Empires (or, How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date)

He writes regularly and very intelligently about technology. While he’s occasionally a bit too self-important and self-congratulatory for my taste, he’s never less than thought-provoking and well-informed.

Whimsley  by Tom Slee

This British-born Canadian doesn’t blog anywhere never enough so far as I am concerned. He writes very clever and amusing stuff, sometimes at great length, about the digital economy. For example, he dedicated dozens of well-thought-out posts to demolishing the book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson; and he has written amusingly about the hidden flaws in the way that Google and Amazon work.

I hope Slee keeps on blogging, because I want to keep on reading his stuff.

Journal  by Sam Pepys

This guy blogs just about every day, and it’s all full of his rich life in London, all the stupidities and corruption of the politicians and bureaucrats that he has to work with, about all the women he bonks (he’s a very naughty man!), his long-suffering wife, and the renovations he’s having done to his house. Just lately, he’s been rather worried about the spread of a dangerous infectious disease in the city, seemingly on the rise every day. And about the progress of the current war with the Dutch, of course.

Fascinating reading. Oh, did I mention that this guy is writing in the 1660s?