What I'm reading ...

I have started More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea by Tom Reynolds.

This book is a collection of blog entries by a paramedic talking about his professional life and his observations about people. It is a sequel to an initial volume that I read a while ago. Easy, entertaining reading that is easy to dip into.

As an experiment, I am reading this as an e-book. It seems to be going well so far.

E-books

All my life I have loved books. I was surrounded by them as a child and cannot remember a time when reading was not part of my life. As a child, my ambition was to write a book. When I was 16 I started on a science fiction novel. I wrote about 30,000 words of drivel. I think I still have the MS in my attic. I finally achieved my ambition when I was about 30.

I own lots of books. They take up an inordinate amount of space and just a few in a box make it too heavy to lift. As I am planning to move house, this is an issue that is on my mind just now. In recent years, I have got better at letting them go. Now, once I have finished reading a book, if I am quite sure that I will not refer to it again, I get rid of it - either sell it or donate it to a charity shop. But maybe a better solution is coming along ...

The demise of conventional paper books has been predicted for many years, as they are replaced by electronic books of some kind. Is that going to happen sometime soon?

Of course, we routinely refer to documents on the screen of desktop computes or laptops, but that is hardly the same thing as reading a whole book. I first tried this about 7 years ago. I was a regular user of Palm devices and got one with a larger screen and wondered what else I could do with it. I read a short novel (Nicholas Sparks, if I recall) using this device. It was easy enough, but did not become a regular habit. Why not? The simple answer is availability. This has two facets. First, the number of e-books available was very limited. Second, the device did not have the power capacity to be used for hours at a stretch.

Things are changing. I have been interested in e-book readers for a while - like the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle. But I never felt that they got cheap enough for a single function device. They both made significant advances on the availability front, with quite large libraries of material and excellent battery lives. But then along came iPad.

It is not just an e-reader - iPad is many other things as well. So it's higher price is more readily justified. Battery life is not as good as dedicated devices, but not at all bad either. Availability of material is good too. Apart from Apple's iBooks offering (which I have yet to be able to sample), the Kindle app gives easy access to Amazon's products. I am sure that others are available and more will come.

I am currently giving it a try. I have obtained some Kindle books and seeing how comfortable I am with reading on the iPad screen. I have reservations about staring at an illuminated screen just before going to sleep. Only time will tell whether this is a problem. I love the way that I can litter books with notes and bookmarks and automatically keep my place in several books at once.

I have always been a big fan of Douglas Adams, who was so creative and far sighted. Some years ago, he was the keynote speaker at a conference that I was attending. I was too busy to go to his talk, figuring that I would get to see the Great Man on another occasion. I was wrong, as he tragically died a few months later. One of his most original creations was the concept of the interactive e-book, which he called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is so sad that he did not live to see this concept embodied in iPad.

Time Traveler - by Dr. Ronald Mallett

Although the title of this book may make it sound like I am on some kind of theme, it is really just a coincidence. I got this book under semi-random circumstances. I had set out for a trip to the US with two reading books and read both of them on the flight over. This left me with nothing for the return flight. I figured that this wasn't a problem, as they have book stores in the US. Not in downtown San Jose they don't! I was amazed to hear that there was not a single book store within walking distance of my hotel, despite it being near the Convention Center and the University. I concluded that this was not a big issue, as I knew there were shops at the airport, but I happened to stop by the shop at The Tech [science/technology museum] and perused their selection of science-oriented books and was attracted by this one.

It is the auto-biography [a genre that I enjoy] of a guy whose father died when he was young. He began to wish he had a time machine to go back and see his father again. This was not just an idle fantasy - it became a lifelong quest. From very humble beginnings, he went on to become a professor of theoretical physics and devoted much research to the possibilities of time travel.

It is a moving and well told story of his journey. As the news has not had headlines of the form "Scientist travels back in time to see father", I am not giving anything away by revealing that he has, as yet, not built a time machine. But I think the author himself would agree that sometimes the journey is more rewarding than the arrival at a particular destination. And he hasn't given up yet.

The Time Traveler's Wife - by Audrey Niffenegger

It is a little while since I read this book. I had heard many good reports of it, but also comments about it being hard to get into initially, but worth the effort. It did take me a few dozen pages to get my head around the time streams, but I guess that many years of Dr Who, Star Trek etc. had prepared me well. I felt a little trepidation, as it is quite a large book and I had not been reading for a while, but I found that I was gripped well enough to not put it down.

It is a thoroughly enjoyable read, a cracking story, which is ultimately all about the people and their relationships. The time travel is just a very imaginative vehicle to carry the story.

Having read the book, I wanted to see the movie, which had mixed reviews, but I was too late, as it was no longer showing. I had it await the release of the DVD, which I bought and viewed recently. This was what spurred me on to write about the book now.

I felt the movie captured the essence of the book very well and we found it very moving. My only tiny disappointment was that a latter [the final?] scene was not included in the movie.

Portuguese Irregular Verbs - by Alexander McCall Smith

I am not sure where this book came from. Having read some of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, I guess the author's name must have caught my attention.

This book is subtitled A Professor Dr von Igelfeld Entertainment and is a collection of eight loosely linked stories covering the Professor's career. The lynchpin of the stories is the Professor's single major publication from which the title of this book is taken, which has sold as few copies as one might expect for a large volume covering such an obscure subject.

All in all, I was entertained and would happily read the other follow-up volumes, but probably would not seek them out. Entertaining.

The Road - by Cormac McCarthy

I was slightly daunted by this book. Although it is not excessively long [about 300 pages], there are reviews on the back cover suggesting it is worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature. I tend to dismiss books that win such awards as being too highbrow and hard work for a casual reader like myself. But I was wrong ...

The story is about a man and his son making a trek across a post-apocalyptic [burnt] America. We are never told their names or precisely what the nature of the prior destruction was. Was it a nuclear war, or was it a natural disaster [like the eruption of the Yellowstone super-volcano]? What we are told is a lot of detail about the world in which they find themselves, which is portrayed very graphically. Equally, their state of mind and feelings and those of people they encounter is clearly conveyed.

I found the book totally compelling and read it surprisingly quickly, finding it quite un-put-downable. It certainly helped a long flight pass comfortably. Highly Recommended.

Einstein's Dreams - by Alan Lightman

This book was a present last Christmas. It is unlikely that I would have read it had I not received it as a gift, but I am glad that I did.

It is a set of short essays, each presented as if it were a dream experienced by Einstein. The theme is that each dream takes place in a different world/universe, where the nature of time is different from what we are used to. For example, in one universe, the degree of order [entropy] tends to increase, the reverse of what we expect; for instance, a broken object reassembles itself. In another universe, each person's perception of time was different; one individual may observe a woman as rushing by, whereas another observer may see her strolling slowly.

I found this quite easy to read, entertaining and thought provoking. Each dream is described very much in terms of the people and their experiences, which brings it to life. Recommended.

Reading again

After a rather longer than expected break, I have started reading again. As I continue to be able to forget a book as soon as I've read it, I thought I'd get back into the habit of posting a few notes after I finish each book.