Last night I made my toughest travel plans yet: choosing what books…

Nov. 2nd, 2004

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Nov. 2nd, 2004

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8:51 AM

Last night I made my toughest travel plans yet: choosing what books to take!

One of the issues under debate was whether to take a big book (I never get to read big books anymore) or a few small books. I opted for the latter. I finally decided on two C.S. Lewis books, Miracles and A Grief Observed. They are the last two books in the Signature Series I've been reading, and despite the length of Miracles (294 pages) should both be fast reads. Plus, Lewis is a Brit, and that is definitely a selling point. I also decided to take Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House, and Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I may or may not take H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights, our next book club selection, which I am already halfway through.

Granted, I still have until tomorrow morning to change my mind, and we all know there's nothing better to do today than think about what books to read!

( 6 comments — Leave a comment )

slinkr

Nov. 2nd, 2004 04:04 pm (UTC)

I really liked both American Gods and Bringing Down the House.

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am0

Nov. 2nd, 2004 07:31 pm (UTC)

Use ebooks and you can carry hundreds in your laptop.

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spwebdesign

Nov. 2nd, 2004 08:10 pm (UTC)

Use ebooks and I will suffer eyestrain and miss out on the pleasure of holding the book in my hands, turning the pages, turning back, writing on the margin, falling asleep with the book propped open on my chest, etc. And with ebooks I have to worry about my battery running out. I will never convert to ebooks for pleasure reading.

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am0

Nov. 3rd, 2004 12:13 pm (UTC)

We lack the technology for an adequate palm sized ebook reader. We could have had it but the people who devised readers were too greedy and produced devices designed to maximize their profit rather than the reader's enjoyment. Blame, in particular, Disney and Microsoft for their efforts to hamper the development of adequate technology to make ebook reading pleasant.

Still, having tried it with my PDA, ebooks should have been the way to read. They are superior to dead tree books in many ways, even despite the attempts to cripple them.

And I have access to over 15,000 books free for the downloading and conversion, many in languages other than English, with the number growing daily.

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spwebdesign

Nov. 4th, 2004 06:10 pm (UTC)

It's a matter of preference. No PDA or ebook reader of any sort will ever replace having a real book in my hands...the feel of the pages between my fingers, the roughness or smoothness, the smell of pages, the notes in the margins, the pliability of the object as you turn it this way and that, abusing the pages and binding. Reading is as much a tactile pleasure as anything else.

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am0

Nov. 5th, 2004 11:58 am (UTC)

Preferences can change. Some day it may be possible to download and carry thousands of books in an easy-to-read, easy-to-carry format that also allows you to make marginal notation. The technology is possible now. Only greed has placed limits on what we can do.

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( 6 comments — Leave a comment )

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