Machine of Death

Machine of Death: a collection of stories about how people who know they will die. The friend who recommended this told me that the stories vary widely in quality, but some of them are delightful. She was right. And it's fun to see an idea stretched and pulled into every imaginable configuration.

Jane Austen, Emma

Jane Austen, Emma. Thought I'd give it another try, although I took such an intense dislike to Elizabeth Bennet when I was young that it leaked over to the rest of Austen. It's too bad, because she does write lovely novels. But Emma makes Elizabeth look like Marie Curie or Joan of Arc. And it's very hard to be interested in any of the lazy, stuck-up, country gentlefolk in this book. What a lot of totally useless people convinced of their own innate superiority and good breeding who do nothing but visit each other and eat food that other people make for them.

Technology

So I've been reading on my smartphone, substituting reading free ebooks for my old favorite vices of sudoku and crossword puzzles. I really enjoyed Secret Adversary (by Agatha Christie - a Tommy and Tuppence!) and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which I hadn't read in ages and had totally forgotten. But one of my favorite books, Notes from the Underground, was a little frustrating to read on a three-inch screen so I gave up and dug it off my bookshelf to finish. I think that phone reading is better suited for less complex reading or at least shorter sentences, as it's tough to focus when flipping the pages so frequently, something a bigger screen would help. I can't imagine how horrible it would be to read Henry James on a phone - it would take three screens per phrase.

If I could read in the bathtub with one, I might buy an eReader device of some sort (especially for magazines and journal articles - I print out way too many pdfs). But I think I am too attached to paper books to ever really change over. I like to lend books, to give them away, to browse through piles of them, to acquire them on curbs from dejected little heaps. I still remember plunking down my Christmas money to buy my first book on my own. It was a paperback copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and I read it 28 times in a row, memorized it, and eventually made a replacement cover for it out of gold foil and candy-wrappers.