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Jan 302010
Jan 292010
Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. RIP J.D. Salinger. Salinger has died in his New Hampshire home at the age of 91, something of a grand old age really. I first read The Catcher in the Rye at the perfect age – mid-teens. By that stage it was about 40 years old, and well after the John Lennon assassination. I loved it. It felt like a revelation of character – an insight into disconnection, uncertainty and sadness, and that terrible desire to not be apart or alone, whilst never trusting that you won’t be disappointed or let-down. Ah, teenagers. I found Franny and Zooey, For Esmé – with Love and Squalor, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in my local library and loved those too, especially For Esmé. Strange really, because there wasn’t a lot there I could on the [...read more...]
My heartwarming moment…
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Jan 282010
…might not be quite what you’re expecting but this comment on the Engadget site’s brandspanking new iPad hands-on post just warmed the cockles of my old, curmudgeonly, fringe-geeky heart. AlwaysThinkin Posted Jan 27th 2010 3:15PM @xCrunk it’s not that heavy, I used to hold the Kindle DX in one hand for long periods and it’s not much smaller. And I used to shoot womp rats too. <3 Oh yeah and there was this Apple iPad launch thingy, change the face of computing as we know it, books dead in the water, who’s got a spare $1000 then?, we’ll all have one in a years time, bow down to the mighty Apple and say And yea did Steve create the iWorld and on the 6th day did Steve see every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. Except it needed an iPad, so he did that too. Kindle [...read more...]
Other e-book opinions (and David Mitchell)
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Jan 272010
I rather enjoy reading opinions on e-books and e-readers from other people, mainly because a) they’re often much cleverer than I, and b) they’re in countries where these devices are actually available (on that note see Lance Wigg’s post this morning about the continuing lack of Kindle availability in NZ). On that note then this is a great down-to-earth article from Publishing Perspectives about the practical issues of reading e-books. Digital publishing design seems to have a long way to go – at least from the point of view of the big publishing houses. They had better start listening. The potential to make digital books objects of beauty has to be huge and could be the deal-breaker for many readers (yours truly included). Speaking of objects of beauty the cover for the new David Mitchell title, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, has been released… historical Japanese plot… David Mitchell… oh my….
Jan 262010
I’m reading Wolf Hall. It is BIG. And it is taking me a while. The good news is I’m halfway! So whilst I finish that… see more Lolcats and funny pictures
Here’s a small bugbear that has been brewing in my mind this weekend regarding many of the e-book reader reviews and comments I’ve been reading recently. It seems like every man and his dog is releasing an e-reader at the moment, guaranteed to be the next Ipod and render books obsolete for good! Ahem. Yeah, whatever. Wait, I have two bugbears. Okay, firstly can we please stop comparing e-readers to CDs/Ipods/whatever and using some old chestnut argument along the lines of “can’t stop progress” for being the reason why we need e-readers? They aren’t the same thing. Here’s a very basic explanation: the model of vinyl record played on record-player, CD played on CD player, MP3 file played on MP3 player has remained a consistent model the whole way through all technological changes around playing and listening to music. Technology has not changed this basic concept, even if it has [...read more...]
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