Mac Graduate ‘83

I haven’t found a recent fantasy writer (who is still writing new stuff) who I like – any recs?

One thing that I absolutely love, however, is the rereading of true classics with my kids. I read to each of my four kids every night, and it gives me the chance to reread (4x) Island of the Blue Dolphins, the Narnia books, Phantom Tollbooth (gets ever more clever the more I read it), etc.

Great literature gets better upon further reflection. I find that as a youth I read a lot of chaff (including all the Stephen King books, Terry Brooks up the wazoo, etc.), but it’s the wheat that remains with me, and that I reread with my kids. It has become a real bonding time for us, and a nice haven with the flurry of all my travel.

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I think that tying too much to one or a few companies is really going to hurt things down the road, just look at google books and all the realization people are having now that they screwed up.

The N1 looks to be nice, but still lacks some major areas, memory, why would i buy a phone that has not even a gb of on board memory when the iphone has 32gb, that makes no sense. I really wanted to like the N1, but all apple needs to do is add snapdragon, larger screen, amoled, better camera and a few other enhancements and they win hands down.

Doctorow’s “For the Win” (related to his short story, “Anda’s Game”) is coming out this spring as well and is about union activism amongst gold farmers in an MMORG.

I’ve always been interested in the diversity of history and impermanence – old books that are easily readable after 500 years (I lost most of my Latin – so that’s a disadvantage) – looking at an Augustinus around 1758 and earlier Q. Horatius Flaccus versus the Internet that permanently records “everything” and nothing gets lost until everything is lost (cf. Jaron Lanier’s comments in his most recent book Your are not a gadget [http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307269647]). How do we maintain, evolve, the somewhat organic process of selection and deletion to escape information entropy?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122822760

Another strike against reading content on a laptop screen that you didn’t mention is the form-factor. Most screens are widescreen these days. Though full-screen apps like Stanza do let you layout side-by-side page views, I have never actually tried reading a book like that. I too find backlit LEDs eye-straining for extended periods.

Speaking of Stanza, it’s still my preferred reader on the iPhone. I managed to read a couple of books on it before I got my Kindle late last year and found it to be a pretty decent experience. I still prefer it over the Kindle app, but the auto-syncing of reading position in the Kindle app is pretty sweet. Curious to see what Amazon does with Kindle in the long-run. I kind of expect they’ll just roll it into the Kindle app gradually.

I love my Kindle and I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with it. I predict they’ll support ePub within the year.

http://n3wb.com/boolean/archives/2010/01/kindle-epub/

Perhaps a follow-up post of sorts? Have you discovered a way to live on only 4 hours sleep?