I actually used the phrase "...should one deign to grace our abode with its noble presence" in a spoken sentence today. And I wasn't even kidding around or anything, but for the fact that I was referring to a hummingbird. A little later I caught myself thinking, "If a garden is a true reflection of the gardener's soul, mine is a dry, desolate place, with only a few stubborn green shoots struggling desperately to survive."
I've been reading a lot of high-minded stuff lately.
My Kindle arrived on August 31, a present for my 47th(!) birthday. I immediately purchased Sigrid Undset's Catherine of Siena ($9.99) and a King James Bible ($0.99). I also uploaded a picture of a statue and a picture of my late dog Juniper (I miss her). A couple days later I uploaded The New Science by Giambattista Vico ($0.00) from the Internet Archive and Andrew Lang's Pink Fairy Book ($0.00).
Between the bus and the train and a couple of long-stretch sittings at home, I finished Catherine today. It's a wonderful book. It has given me a lot to think about. Reading Undset is liking standing on an ocean shore; thoughts and ideas and history come in overlapping waves. It's enchanting, hypnotic.
As for reading on the Kindle, the screen is dimmer than I thought it would be - the contrast is clean, but the color of the page seems dark. I am an inveterate low-light reader, but a dim lamp that I could use for a paperback isn't really bright enough for the Kindle. The trade-off is that it in good light, it's really easy on the eyes, and I've found I can read for an hour or two or three with no eye strain at all. Can't say that for a computer screen. It's kind of weird, though, because it's a device, you know, and it sort of looks and acts like a computer screen, so you expect it to be brighter, which is why, I think, I've been noticing the darkness of the background. But I'll get used to it. All of the interface elements - the page-turn buttons, the menus - are quiet, understated, which really gets them out of the way of the reading. Nicely done.
I'm mulling over a plan to read along with the St. John's College liberal arts graduate curriculum, which is why I uploaded the Vico. I've skimmed a few pages so far. Maybe I'll start with the undergraduate curriculum.
In other news, apropos of nothing, we learned today that "niwanowani" is Japanese for "alligator in the yard."
cool--all of it. Good to hear a critique of the kindle.
ReplyDeleteA client of mine switched to iPad because of bad formatting on the Kindle - she hates widows and orphans, and badly-ragged or overhyphenated right-side text. She says the iPad formatted books are much more satisfactory, smoother to read. Just FYI.
ReplyDeleteI haven't had a problem with that so far, which is strange because I'm one of those whose eye jumps immediately to the tiniest flaws on a printed page. The Vico and the Lang texts are a mess. Catherine had a tenuous grasp on the proper use of quotation marks. But the Bible and another $0.99 download, Hugo's The Man Who Laughs, are both really clean. Hit and miss.
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