snuggy little kindle (for dummies)

The Kindle is working out well for me.  Within the first couple of days I'd read The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich (ZOMBG, wow), The Wizard of Oz, Patrick Ness's collection Topics About Which I Know Nothing (which has a hilarious SF story in it called 'quis custodiet ipsos custodes?') and had started Cloud Atlas.  Aaaaaannnnndddd....then I got stuck for weeks.  Partly this is because I got super-busy with OU work.  Also, Cloud Atlas is good, but I got bogged down in the weird dialect on the island about two-thirds of the way through and haven't recovered my momentum yet.  I'm not able to read it in little chunks while the veggies are being microwaved.  That's what Twitter is for!

Cloud Atlas has also made apparent to me one of the problems I have with Kindle: I can't easily flip back and forth to look at other parts of the book.  There's a kind of blindness, a tunnel-vision, reading with Kindle. Only a quibble, of course.  (That, and the thing needs a built-in book light.  How are you supposed to read in bed?)

The no-illumination problem stimulated me to finish paper books that I'd had lying around for far too long.  One of these is mainstream literary novel The Wonder by Diana Evans.  I loved her first book, 26a, which was a fast if heart-tearing read.  The newer book was not a fast read, but ultimately a rewarding one.  I can't think of anything to say about Evans' writing that doesn't sound canned, and she is most certainly not a canned sort of writer.  Her voice is distinctive and she roams between planes freely, and she is subtle.  I'm going to look out for more of her work for sure.

I also just finished Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie.  Slim little arrow of a book about two young men sent to 'the mountains' for re-education under Mao in the early 1970s, and a secret suitcase of Western novels.  And a girl.  Superb story.  Very funny, also.

The other thing I'm supposed to be reading right now is Calculus For Dummies.  I also bought Calculus For Dummies II, because I have another year of math ahead of me and you can never be too dumb about calculus.  Scouting forays indicate that these books will be helpful.  But on Tuesday night my tutur within two minutes sorted out the gobbledegook on integration in the OU text that I'd been struggling with for hours.  Now I  feel less panicky and more lazy. 

Sigh.  Truly, I will do as little as I can get away with, most days.