Travis and Michelle Fitzgerald's blog

I’ve had my Kindle for about three months now, so it’s time for a review! I’ve posted a couple of comments on Facebook but I hadn’t really organized my thoughts yet. This started out as one post but I realized as I typed that I have a lot to say. Right now there are four parts: Reading, New Content, Features, and Human Factors. So…let the review begin…

I just got a Kindle (e-book reader). Pretty cool! Nice screen (e-ink rocks), light weight, easy to use. But I’ve found the hardest thing is figuring out what books to buy for it! There’s a great temptation to run out and buy all my favorite books for it, but…I already have those books. Do I really need them in another format? Not at the moment. I think the books I’m most likely to buy for the Kindle are the sort of books I would borrow or get out of the library - Dan Brown sort of novels that are fun to read, but don’t really tempt me to re-read over and over. Hmm. Must think about whether I want to spend ~$10 for them now.

I hope a digital library is coming sometime soon. I would pay $1 or so to check out a book for two weeks. I already know Amazon can go in and delete whatever they want to off the Kindle (witness that issue a few months back where they’d sold a book they didn’t have the rights to, so they deleted it from everyone’s devices with a refund). Doesn’t seem a far stretch to checking things out.

So, all that being said…I’m still going to run out and buy some of my favorite books, just because it’s so cool! And there’s also a neat feature that I can email PDFs, HTMLs, Word documents, and things to Amazon and they’ll send them back in the right format to put on the Kindle. Baen Books has a bunch of free books in HTML…this ought to be fun.

~Michelle

I just finished re-reading one of my favorite books: Song for the Basilisk by Patricia McKillip. (Yes, the title of this post is kind of a joke; I have a LOT of favorite books. ) It’s one of those books I giggle my way through, but as much as I’d like to I can’t explain the joke–or coolness factor–or clever pun–to my puzzled husband.

Ms. McKillip’s books are fantasy bordering on poetry, so just reading the passage is generally out of the question. “Finally the mirrors emptied even of servants, who left them to reflect themselves, while the onyx-eyed basilisks turned one another into stone.” See, the musicians were playing in the Hall of Mirrors, and earlier the basilisks were being compared with…oh, never mind.

And of course, as I looked for a suitable quote, I just got caught in a couple of passages and had to read for a while, never mind that I just finished the book. Ms. McKillip’s books have tapestries for covers, prose that morphs into poetry and back, facinating characters…she’s one of the authors that I’m likely to pick up whatever she next writes at the bookstore.

No, there’s no real point to this post other than: I like this author, and I really like this book.

I’m rarely wrong about books. Hmm, that needs a little explanation.

I’m rarely wrong, after the first chapter or so, about whether I will like a book. And by “like” (for those of you who don’t know my reading habits) I mean “keep on my shelf and read at least five more times". Given this definition, it may be a bit surprising that my bookshelves aren’t groaning under the weight of …wait. I digress.

The happy part of either liking or never finishing books (and the latter is rather rare) is that authors who write styles and characters that I like to read generally supply an ending that I enjoy as well. A satisfactory conclusion all around. This is not always the case.

At Thanksgiving I was telling the family that although the movie looks faciniating, I was never able to get through The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. Didn’t like it, couldn’t read it, wanted to slap all the characters. And on these matters I am rarely wrong. But, afterwards I pulled the book back down and gave it another go. I got all the way through this time, and needed to see where this story was going. I bought the other two books in the trilogy and sat down to read.

Have you ever seen The Princess Bride (movie) where the Grandson gets fed up with the book and asks his Grandpa, “Who gets Humperdinck?” On getting an unsatisfactory answer, the kid yells, “Jesus, Grandpa, what did you read me this thing for??” That’s how I felt at the end of the trilogy. On the one hand, perhaps I should have listened to my initial response and not read on. On the other, I got about two and a half books worth of decent story out of the trilogy, which isn’t bad. Maybe I just won’t read the ending anymore (though there isn’t really a good break point where it gets depressing…).

I’m still looking forward to the movie, however. It will be interesting to see how it ends.
~M