One area where treebooks come out ahead of ebooks are christmas presents. I suppose the best way to give someone a Kindle book would be to put it on a pretty USB memory stick or a CD-ROM with a fancy label (using up only a ridiculously low amount of space on either), but with most commercially available works that is not even an option thanks to Digital Restrictions Management.

There has been some criticism against Isaacson's book, some going as far as suggesting that Steve Jobs picked the wrong guy to write his biography, pointing out that Isaacson, who is not a tech journalist, shows no interest in educating himself or the reader about this industry and the technology, resulting is somewhat sloppy and lazy reporting, which would not matter that much if this was just about one book out of many instead of an historic opportunity to get the story straight from the notoriously tight-lipped (and now forever closed) horse's mouth. I think it is more of a case of John Siracusa having picked the wrong book, and that the book we really want about the second coming can still be written, with extended input from folks like Avie Tevanian, Jonathan Rubinstein, Tony Fadell, Scott Forstall, and a certain Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

So what we get instead is what could be expected of a biography: it concerns itself mostly with Steve Jobs as a person, and I think it is worth a read for that. If nothing else, it made me interested in the upcoming biopic. You may want to wait for a second edition though, as the editing feels a bit rushed and Isaacson may have some more material to add (he admits to having redacted some information about future Apple products, and says he also wants to write about the popular reaction to Jobs' passing).

Some interesting tidbits from the book (only funny ones, not one of the many sad or depressing examples that show what a terrible person Jobs could be):

• Steve Jobs would run around bare-footed, and his colleagues, already annoyed by having to look at his dirty feet on the meeting table, were not happy to learn that he would stick them in the toilet to relax.
• For three years, Jobs was in a relationship with Joan Baez, which must have been curious as Bob Dylan was one of his heroes.
• At a birthday party Yoko Ono was hosting for her nine-year-old son Sean Lennon, Andy Warhol and Keith Haring were so exited about the Macintosh computer that Steve Jobs had brought as a gift that they insisted they go over to Mick Jagger's house and show it to him as well (pretty high name-dropping-per-sentence ratio right there).
• Homer Simpson's mother is named after Steve Jobs' sister.
• Andy Hertzfeld (software engineer on the original Mac team) seems to be a genuinely nice guy.

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.

The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.

The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.

The man Jack paused on the landing. With his left hand he pulled a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his black coat, and with it he wiped off the knife and his gloved right hand which had been holding it; then he put the handkerchief away. The hunt was almost over. He had left the woman in her bed, the man on the bedroom floor, the older child in her brightly colored bedroom, surrounded by toys and half-finished models. That only left the little one, a baby barely a toddler, to take care of. One more and his task would be done.

He flexed his fingers. The man Jack was, above all things, a professional, or so he told himself, and he would not allow himself to smile until the job was completed.

A toddler escapes a knife murderer by climbing out of his crib and walking up the hill into a graveyard where the ghosts decide to take him in and look after his well-being until he grows up. Neil Gaiman tells his story in eight chapters, each of them set two years apart and a short story in its own right. Wonderful writing, won numerous awards in the young adult categories and beyond, inspired by The Jungle Book, in a perfect mood for bed-time stories or Tim Burton movies (even though the equally qualified Neil Jordan is apparently working on it now).

I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare--or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad--who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping. There's no doubt the man's right. It's absolutely that way with me. Take, for instance, the fairly rummy matter of Lady Malvern and her son Wilmot. A moment before they turned up, I was just thinking how thoroughly all right everything was.

It was one of those topping mornings, and I had just climbed out from under the cold shower, feeling like a two-year-old. As a matter of fact, I was especially bucked just then because the day before I had asserted myself with Jeeves--absolutely asserted myself, don't you know. You see, the way things had been going on I was rapidly becoming a dashed serf. The man had jolly well oppressed me. I didn't so much mind when he made me give up one of my new suits, because, Jeeves's judgment about suits is sound. But I as near as a toucher rebelled when he wouldn't let me wear a pair of cloth-topped boots which I loved like a couple of brothers. And when he tried to tread on me like a worm in the matter of a hat, I jolly well put my foot down and showed him who was who. It's a long story, and I haven't time to tell you now, but the point is that he wanted me to wear the Longacre--as worn by John Drew--when I had set my heart on the Country Gentleman--as worn by another famous actor chappie--and the end of the matter was that, after a rather painful scene, I bought the Country Gentleman. So that's how things stood on this particular morning, and I was feeling kind of manly and independent.

Coming right off Sherlock Holmes, I cannot help but notice some similarities between the famous detective stories and P. G. Wodehouse's writings about Bertie Wooster and his manservant Jeeves. Both are about the adventures of two English men who share an apartment where a variety of curious cases is brought before them, one of the pair possessed of remarkable problem-solving capabilities, the other recounting the story in the form of memoirs, published in a series of novels and short stories, books that are now the works for which their authors are mostly known for, characters that have become more popular than their creators, have appeared in film and television, and have even given names to information retrieval computer products.

Only four of the eight stories in My man Jeeves are about Jeeves and Wooster, but the other four are very similar in style, structure and content and feature Reggie Pepper, an earlier prototype of the rich and idle foppish young English gentleman.

It's getting late.

I don’t have too sharp a sense of time any more, but I know it must be after eleven, and maybe even getting on for midnight. I’m reluctant to look at my watch, though—because that will only remind me of how little time I have left.

In any case, it’s getting late.

And it’s quiet. Apart from the ice-machine humming outside my door and the occasional car passing by on the highway, I can’t actually hear a thing—no traffic, or sirens, or music, or local people talking, or animals making weird nightcalls to each other, if that’s what animals do. Nothing. No sounds at all. It’s eerie, and I don’t really like it. So maybe I shouldn’t have come all the way up here. Maybe I should have just stayed in the city, and let the time-lapse flicker of the lights short-circuit my now preternatural attention span, let the relentless bustle and noise wear me down and burn up all this energy I’ve got pumping through my system. But if I hadn’t come up here to Vermont, to this motel—to the Northview Motor Lodge—where would I have stayed? I couldn’t very well have inflicted my little mushroom-cloud of woes on any of my friends, so I guess I had no option but to do what I did—get in a car and leave the city, drive hundreds of miles up here to this quiet, empty part of the country . . .

When a book gets the Hollywood treatment, it usually means the addition of three things: A happy ending, a love interest, and a car chase. This pretty much sums up the main differences between Alan Glynn's novel and its movie adaptation. Most of Eddie Spinola's story is essentially the same: He bumps into his ex-brother-in-law, gets into possession of brain-function-enhancing drugs, borrows some money from a Russian loan-shark to get into stock market day-trading, excels at that and gets hired by an investment banker to broker a massive merger for a huge bonus. But he does not have a girl friend that he needs to win back, he is not being chased by a mysterious man trying to steal his stash, and without giving away too much, it should be obvious from the bookending opening paragraphs that while Eddie Spinola pictures himself in an ending very much like the one Eddie Morra gets to enjoy in the movie, things do not quite pan out that way.

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest. Again and again I had registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject, but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty. His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which I had had of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him.

When no interesting cases are brought before Europe's premier consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes' mind rebels at stagnation and he resorts to cocaine to stimulate his thoughts. Fortunately, this does not happen a lot, as there are a great many mysteries for him to solve, the reports of which make up four novels and five collections of short stories, all written in the form of first-person recollections by his friend, assistant, and occasional room mate John Holmes, a military surgeon forced to retire early after being seriously injured in Afghanistan.

With their copyright expired, all of Conan Doyle's writings are available for free, and I am about half-way through now.

Richard kept his head down. Not all those cow pies were frozen, and the ones that were could turn an ankle. He'd limited his baggage to a carry-on, so the size 11s weaving their way among the green-brown mounds were meshy black cross-trainers that you could practically fold in half and stuff into a pocket. He could have gone to Walmart this morning and bought boots. The reunion, however, would have noticed, and made much of, such an extravagance.

Two dozen of his relatives were strung out in clumps along the barbed-wire fence to his right, shooting into the ravine or reloading. The tradition had started as a way for some of the younger boys to blow off steam during the torturous wait for turkey and pie. In the old days, once they’d gotten back to Grandpa's house from Thanksgiving church service and changed out of their miniature coats and ties, they would burst out the doors and sprint half a mile across the pasture, trailed by a few older men to make sure that matters didn't get out of hand, and shoot .22s and Daisies down into the crick. Now grown up with kids of their own, they showed up for the re-u with shotguns, hunting rifles, and handguns in the backs of their SUVs.

Much to his chagrin, the details (involving drug money and motorcycle gangs) about the origin of the money that allowed Richard to buy Schloß Hundschüttler and turn it into a ski resort are amply covered by his Wikipedia entry. After he turned daily operations over to people who actually knew what they were doing, Richard found himself with a lot of free time to play World of Warcraft, culminating into what would have been a Lost Decade, had this not given him the idea to start his own online game, focused on supporting a thriving in-game economy, creating a multi-billion company in the process.

The massively multiplayer world of T'Rain had been designed to be as accessible to the all-important Chinese teenager market as it was to the pudgy middle-aged Westerners who were dependent upon those teenagers for virtual gold. The Westerners got to have more fun, and kids like Marlon were actually making money. Playing the game, to them, was a source of income rather than an expense, and most of them are perfectly happy with the arrangement. Marlon decided that he could increase that income even further by creating a virus that would infect T'Rain players' computers and encrypt their files, making them inaccessible until they purchased the decryption key by dropping off virtual gold in the virtual Torgai Foothills. As a direct consequence, the influx of characters carrying ransom money, other characters attacking them to get to that money, and a third group paid by Marlon to protect the first group from the second, turns the Torgai Foothills into a war zone. As an unexpected consequence (especially since he was asking for just $73), the same thing happens to the building where Marlin lives.

That Zula's boyfriend Peter had been using their trip to meet Uncle Richard at his hotel to sell a memory stick full of stolen credit card numbers in Canada was already bad enough to result in a relationship termination event. But it was made much worse by the fact that the memory stick contained a virus, that the virus would encrypt and hold for ransom all the data on the computers of the Russian gangsters behind the deal, that those people would show up at Peter's apartment in the middle of the night just as she was moving out her stuff, and that they would take them along in their private jet to China in order to find the virus author.

Yuxia is from Yongding, where the Big-Footed Women make the high mountain tea. She has learned to speak English from books, movies, and working as a tourist guide for Australian backpackers. She came to Xiamen to sell her hometown's high mountain tea, mostly to wholesellers, but also to tourists on the streets. Chatting up a certain group of foreigners turns out to be a very dangerous idea.

When Sokolov decided to quit active military duty it was mostly because he thought that work as a private security consultant would be less stressful, even if his clients turned out to be rich Russian businessmen with questionable backgrounds. And usually that would be the case. He could probably have remained on top of things inspite of getting involved in clearly illegal and dangerous activities undertaken by his apparently clinically insane employer. But after they stumble into the wrong apartment in Xiamen, his experiences in Afghanistan and Chechnya are barely enough just to keep him alive.

As far as Csongor could tell from working for organized criminals as a system administrator, these people are not like how they are presented in movies. Almost all of what they do is very boring. So when he was asked to go to Moscow for a meeting and upon arrival was instead recommended to board a plane full of certain types of people, he knew that this was going to be highly unusual. But that could not possibly have prepared him for going from drinking beer in Budapest four days ago to hijacking a boat in China, falling in love and killing people.

Olivia had just devoted the better part of a year, and MI6 had spent half a million quid, on setting her up with a false Chinese identity so that she could work under deep cover within the borders of the Middle Kingdom. That cover is blown, and she finds herself on the run, when a blue-eyed Russian-speaking man, who apparently had a big part in the sudden activity (such as fully automated weapons being fired, and what the news would later report on as a gas leak explosion) at the building she was spying on from across the street, comes crashing through her window.

Remember what I said about e-book pricing?

"I'd happily buy ebooks for 3 Euro, moan about but can agree to 5 Euro, and for something that I really, really want (say, a brand-new Neal Stephenson) can see myself fork over 10 Euro maybe once a year, but not many titles fit that range. "

Well, that just happened.

Amazon sent me an email that I might be interested in "REAMDE", Neal Stephenson's upcoming new novel, for which they are now taking pre-orders and which will be available from September, 20th. There are two versions of the book by two different publishers (William Morrow and Atlantic Books), and three different editions (softcover, hardcover and Kindle), making for a grand total of seven different items in the shop (plus the audio versions):

And for some reason, one of the two Kindle versions is a lot cheaper and available for purchase right now. I could not find any explanation or advertisement for that. I suppose this is some kind of secretive marketing experiment. Or a mistake. Get it while you can.

"I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one. Or at least as close as we're going to get."

"That's what you said about the brother."

"The brother tested out impossible. For other reasons. Nothing to do with his ability. "

"Same with the sister. And there are doubts about him. He's too malleable. Too willing to submerge himself in someone else's will."

"Not if the other person is his enemy."

"So what do we do? Surround himself with enemies all the time?"

"If we have to."

"I thought you said you liked this kid."

"If the buggers get him, they'll make me look like the favorite uncle."

“All right. We’re saving the world, after all. Take him.”

Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is just six years old when he is brought to the orbital Battle School, to be trained to command humanity's space fleet in a desperate fight against alien invaders. Not that he was allowed much of a childhood before that, either. The military had been grooming him every since he was born. In fact, after realizing the potential in his older brother and sister, and that those two were too unstable to control, the military had even commissioned his birth, making him a Third, a social stigma that set him even more apart from other children than the monitor on his neck or his superior intellect already did.

An amazing book. Gripping plot and characters aside, you have to be impressed by Card's accurate vision of the future. People have always-connected tablet devices, and engage in discussions on online message boards, using pseudonyms for which they have to first build a reputation, and from time to time law enforcement tries to find out real identities. War games are fought in simulators, and it is impossible to tell the difference between a video game and a real battle. All in a novel that was published in 1985, based on a short story from 1977.

Frozen snow, severe frost. Midwinter.

Early in January 2006 a lone wolf crosses the unmarked border and enters Sweden from Vauldalen in Norway. A man on a snowmobile thinks he might have glimpsed it just outside Fjällnäs, but the wolf vanishes into the trees heading east before he is able to pinpoint it. In the remote Norwegian Österdalarna Mountains it had discovered a lump of frozen moose carcass, with remnants of meat still clinging to the bones. But that was more than two days ago. It is beginning to feel the pain of hunger and is desperately searching for food.

The wolf is a young male that has set out to find a territory of his own. He continues his way eastward. At Nävjarna, north of Linsell, he finds another moose carcass. For a whole day he stays and eats his fill before resuming his trek east. When he comes to Karböle he trots over the frozen Ljusnan and then follows the river along its winding route toward the sea. One moonless night he lopes silently over the bridge at Järvsö, then heads into the vast forests that stretch to the coast.

In the early morning of January 13 the wolf reaches Hesjövallen, a tiny village south of Hansesjön Lake in Hälsingland. He pauses and sniffs the air. He detects the smell of blood. He looks around. There are people living in the houses but no smoke rising from the chimneys. His sharp ears can't detect the slightest sound.

But the wolf is in no doubt about the blood. He skulks at the edge of the forest, nose in the air. Then he moves forward, silently, through the snow. The smell comes from one of the houses at the far end of the hamlet. He is vigilant now—with humans around it's essential to be both careful and patient. He pauses again. The smell originates from the back of the house. He waits. Then eventually starts moving once more. When he gets there he finds another carcass. He drags his large meal back to the trees. He has not been discovered, not even the village dogs have stirred. The silence is total this freezing cold morning.

The wolf starts eating when he comes to the edge of the trees. It is easy, as the flesh has not yet frozen. He is very hungry now. Having pulled off a leather shoe, he starts gnawing away at an ankle.

It snowed during the night but stopped before dawn. As the wolf eats his fill, snowflakes once again start dancing down toward the frozen ground.

Everyone in the small village the wolf has stumbled upon has been tortured and brutally murdered (with the exception of an old lady and two day traders who did not even notice what happened to their neighbours, and a young boy who was killed quickly and spared torture). A judge, whose mother was raised by one of the victim families (actually all the victims were of the same family), starts investigating on her own, uncovering a tale of revenge that started 150 years ago and spans four continents.

"We should start back,” Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them. “The wildlings are dead.”

“Do the dead frighten you?” Ser Waymar Royce asked with just the hint of a smile.

Gared did not rise to the bait. He was an old man, past fifty, and he had seen the lordlings come and go. “Dead is dead,” he said. “We have no business with the dead.”

“Are they dead?” Royce asked softly. “What proof have we?”

“Will saw them,” Gared said. “If he says they are dead, that’s proof enough for me.”

Will had known they would drag him into the quarrel sooner or later. He wished it had been later rather than sooner. “My mother told me that dead men sing no songs,” he put in.

“My wet nurse said the same thing, Will,” Royce replied. “Never believe anything you hear at a woman’s tit. There are things to be learned even from the dead.” His voice echoed, too loud in the twilit forest.

So I got myself into another epic (in scope and in page count) fantasy series. A Game of Thrones is the first of seven books in George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, five of which have been published already, the latest one just this month, but with five to six years between the releases of the last two, which could mean that I am in for an uncomfortable wait again (I have already finished the first three volumes).

I have read somewhere that this was "fantasy for grown-ups", "with no elves, fairies, wizards, ancient curses, young men on quests or supernatural forces of evil", "soaked in blood and sex". The part about no supernatural forces being involved is not true: While A Game of Thrones is mostly about lords and ladies, knights and squires, trueborns and bastards, tournaments and battles, weddings and funerals, politics and sword-play, alliances and conspiracies, it also features walking dead, hatching dragons, and wolf dreams, elements that start playing bigger parts in the later books. But there is indeed plenty of killing, plenty of dying, and plenty of sex here. That may sound like a medieval "bodice ripper" with gallant acts of sword-play through into the mix, but the Song of Ice and Fire is much more grim and gritty, with the full range of adultery, rape, incest, child abuse, prostitution, beheadings, burnings, falls, flayings, hangings, mutilations, tramplings, poisonings, drownings, freezings, stranglings, guttings, throat-openings, throat-rippings, batterings, and maulings. The seven kingdoms of Westeros are not a place you want to dream yourself into.

The story has a great number of protagonists, taking turns with each chapter dedicated to (and named after) one of them. Interestingly, many of them are children. Disturbingly, they also get the full share of killing, dying and sex. In the beginning, I was concerned about the characters being too obviously cast as good or evil, but this goes away as you spend more time with them, as back story and motivations for the evil villains are revealed and the honourable heroes start doing terrible things as well (or just die, which is not something fairy tale princes are supposed to do either).

Kindle notes:

We actually have two Kindles at the moment, because Cissy's boss claims to be too busy to read and lent her his, thereby also exposing us to a Scandinavian financial industry ex-pat's choice of literature, which is much different from what we usually read (sci-fi/fantasy novels and Japanese detective stories, respectively): mostly non-fiction, with a smattering of these currently popular, disturbingly violent Swedish crime novels.

Three Cups of Tea is the 2007 autobiography by American Greg Mortenson, who after a failed attempt to climb K2 was sheltered by impoverished Pakistani villagers, and out of gratidute promised to build a school for their children. He has to struggle to raise the funds back in the States, and navigate his way around political, religious and other realities in Pakistan, but eventually the school gets built and the project develops into the Central Asia Institute, a charity which has since constructed more than fifty schools in the remote mountain areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I am not too familiar with non-fiction, but what strikes me as odd is that while Greg Mortenson is listed as the main author (co-author David Oliver Relin appears to have done most of the writing), and he is the subject here, the book is written in the third person. It would have sounded more natural in the first person, more honest, and more subjective, which seems appropriate (especially in hind-sight) as it is just one man's account.

The book ends rather abruptly when Mortenson crosses from Pakistan into post-Taliban Afghanistan to resume his humanitarian efforts there. Wanting to know how that went, I opened Wikipedia and found that there is a second book that picks up where Three Cups ended. I also found depressing reports that over the last few months, very serious allegations have been made against Mortenson and his work, claiming that the events in his books have been highly fictionalized, that the Central Asia Institute is lacking financial accountability, that most part of the funds it raises are spent on book tours, and that many of the schools have since been repurposed or abandoned.

Jon Krakauer is selling a book called Three Cups of Deceit now, where he tells a very different story. I queued this one up as well, even though I am not really interested in what seems to be a very negative, very aggressive, very meticulous, and unforgiving report. Proceeds from Krakauer's book go to another Himalayan charity.

I do not doubt that the Central Asia Institute is an unaccountable mess (that's what it sounds like in Mortenson's book anyway), I would not be surprised if many of the events in the book are embellished or made up, and I do not blame Mortenson for not living on a shoe-string anymore. If Mortenson took a dollar and wasted 80 cents on himself or by being inefficient, that would still be 20 cents more than without him. Of course, if the dollar he was given would otherwise have gone to a "better" charity, that would be tragic (but it is not unlikely that the dollar would not have been raised at all without his inspirational exaggerations).

I just hope (and am still confident) that there was not really "deceit" or criminal intent involved (and I am willing to apply Pakistani standards here, not American ones), and that at the end of day there are more schools in the Himalayas than there were before Greg Mortenson visited the region.

Cissy got a Chinese-language book from the library about the ten worst (in terms of negative impact on the world) books ever. Skipping through the table of contents, I noticed that it covers thirteen. Cissy could not offer an explanation for this, and I had not even heard of some of the titles, so I turned to Amazon to find out more. The book is a translation of an American book published in 2008, entitled 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help. That would make fifteen.

The author, Benjamin Wiker, is a member of a religious fundamentalist think tank, and the customer reviews for his book on Amazon are part of the heated and ongoing creation-vs-evolution controversy in the United States, and as such completely useless as a quality indicator for the work: There is an even split between one-star and five-star reviews, with pretty much nothing in between, the comments on both sides are mostly just attacks on or praise for the author and the two camps, with no clear indication that the book itself has informed them at all.

So here is Wiker's list of fifteen:

• Machiavelli - The Prince (1513)
• Descartes - Discourse on Method (1637)
• Hobbes - Leviathan (1651)
• Rousseau - Discourse on Inequality (1755)
• Marx - Communist Manifesto (1848)
• Mill - Utilitarianism (1863)
• Darwin - The Descent of Man (1871)
• Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
• Lenin - The State and Revolution (1917)
• Sanger - The Pivot of Civilization (1922)
• Hitler - Mein Kampf (1925)
• Freud - Future of an Illusion (1927)
• Mead - Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
• Kinsey - Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)
• Friedan - The Feminine Mystique (1963)

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess why two of them did not make it into the Chinese edition.

Though the evening breeze had chilled his back on the way across, it hadn't yet begun its nightly job of sweeping out from among the island's clustered vines and palm boles the humid air that the day had left behind, and Benjamin Hurwood's face was gleaming with sweat before the black man had led him even a dozen yards into the jungle. Hurwood hefted the machete that he gripped in his left—and only— hand, and peered uneasily into the darkness that seemed to crowd up behind the torchlit vegetation around them and overhead, for the stories he'd heard of cannibals and giant snakes seemed entirely plausible now, and it was difficult, despite recent experiences, to rely for safety on the collection of ox- tails and cloth bags and little statues that dangled from the other man's belt. In this primeval rain forest it didn't help to think of them as gardes and arrets and drogues rather than fetishes, or of his companion as a bocor rather than a witch doctor or shaman.

The black man gestured with the torch and looked back at him. "Left now," he said carefully in English, and then added rapidly in one of the debased French dialects of Haiti, "and step carefully—little streams have undercut the path in many places."

"Walk more slowly, then, so I can see where you put your feet," replied Hurwood irritably in his fluent textbook French. He wondered how badly his hitherto perfect accent had suffered from the past month's exposure to so many odd variations of the language

My first purchase on the Kindle store supposedly was a source of inspiration for the recent Pirates of the Caribbean movie of the same name. And indeed it details the adventures of a young man who gets dragged into the pirate captain Edward "Blackbeard" Teach's quest for the Fountain of Youth, as first discovered by Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon two hundred years earlier. There is also a good deal of voodoo and zombies in both works, but except for these topical similarities, book and movie do not have a lot in common, least of all plot and main characters.

The book follows John Chandagnac, a puppeteer who travels from Europe to Haiti to confront his uncle about his share in the family inheritance, only to have the ship he is travelling on taken over by a gang of pirates that he is forced to join. Determined to save (and ideally marry) a fellow passenger, the young daughter of an apparently mad professor, from the terrible fate her father is planning for her, as well as from her disturbing physician and the wild pirates, he has to stick around a while longer, quickly turning into Jack Shandy, first a pirate cook, eventually a pirate captain.

The two big themes here being voodoo and sailboats, and me not especially fond of voodoo (which I noticed while reading Anne Rice), the follow-up reads I have queued up are Moby-Dick and The Sea-Wolf.

I have been using Amazon's Kindle ebook reader for a week now, and am really happy with it.

The main attraction is the e-ink screen, which looks great and is supposedly easy on the eyes as well (I am looking at computer screens the whole day, though, and do not have problems there, either). Because of the e-ink technology, the display cannot show colours or movement, so it (and the whole Kindle) can really only be used for text, and not to view photos or videos. None of this is a problem because this dedication to its single purpose makes the Kindle easy to use, light, thin, and cheap (it also has an excellent battery life, I did not have to recharge it during the whole week). This is not meant to compete with a tablet computer. You want both. One feature Amazon needs to add in the next version, though, is a touch screen. While that is also arguably unnecessary, it has become very confusing to have a device in this form factor and not be able to control it with your finger. Everyone I have shown the Kindle to immediately taps on the screen, and after a week I still catch myself doing the same. No fancy multitouch needed here, but just the ability to select books and tap through dialog boxes would be good.

The one part that does not work right now is WiFi connectivity (and the associated Whispernet, which magically makes books appear on your Kindle): It just won't connect to any WiFi network, and I have tried many. I am not sure if this is a Kindle problem (probably, the forums are full with complaints, but on the other hand the forums always are), a cloud service problem, or a China problem (did not work over VPN either, though). While unfortunate, this is by no means a show stopper, because you can still sync it via USB, buy books from the web site, and Whispernet only works with Amazon content anyway, so that the Kindle already needed to become part of my USB Dance Ritual (Time Machine backup, and updating everyone's iPods) every morning.

The main reason why I wanted an e-ink reader (ever since Sony first came out with them) is to be able to read a certain German newspaper that I have grown fond (and even own a small part) of. When moving to Tokyo eight years ago I had the regular dead-tree subscription for a while, but that was terribly expensive, terribly inefficient transportation-wise, and terribly delayed (you do not really want a daily paper two or three days later). Thus, I have been following their experiments with alternative delivery mechanisms (such as local on-demand printing in cooperation with hotels and bookstores) with great interest. They have very early on offered electronic versions, but I did not want to read a PDF on a laptop. I tried that on the OLPC (which I also got mostly to use as an ebook reader), and it worked okay for documents properly formatted for screens (as opposed to for print), but such a version was not made available. A big break-through came with the iPhone (iPod touch in my case), first with an ill-fated attempt to publish via iBooks (which does not work for periodicals), then with their own app, complete with in-app-purchases, so you did not even have to get the monthly subscription. I was quite happy with that (even though a bigger screen would have been nice), but that iPod is no more (replacement scheduled for Christmas, assuming there is a new model by then). Now with the Kindle the problem is finally solved. I can get the current edition of my newspaper whenever I want, read it comfortably (except for photos, that still needs some work to display them properly, but at least the cartoons are done right, those are probably easier because their layout dimensions are the same every day), and pay either by monthly subscription, or for individual issues (which I'll probably do since I do not read it every day).

Beyond that, the Kindle is obviously great for reading novels. When I ordered it, I was not expecting to be able to buy commercial titles from Amazon, because Kindle was a US-only service. But two days after my order Amazon suddenly opened the German Kindle store (not sure if I can take credit for that, though), so that I now have this option, too, in addition to public domain classics and creative-commons works. My immediate reaction was to try to pick up the Wheel of Time series again (currently being finished by Brandon Sanderson based on material left behind by the late Robert Jordan), but there seems to be a quarrel going on between Amazon and the publisher, so that the novels are sometimes available as ebooks, and sometimes not (at the moment they are not). In general, though, availability seems to be no problem, Amazon claims to have 650.000 titles. The price however is a problem, at least with the traditional publishers: I'd happily buy ebooks for 3 Euro, moan about but can agree to 5 Euro, and for something that I really, really want (say, a brand-new Neal Stephenson) can see myself fork over 10 Euro maybe once a year, but not many titles fit that range. Amazon seems to be unhappy about that as well, and for most of the expensive books there is a remark about how "the price was set by the publisher". For now, I have gotten free sample first chapters (a very nice feature Amazon offers) of the next Dark Tower book, an older Neal Stephenson novel, and my most likely purchase, the four book Game of Thrones bundle.

Three. This is the number of your fate.

Three?

Yes, three is mystic. Three stands at the heart of the mantra.

Which three?

The first is dark-haired. He stands on the brink of robbery and murder. A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN.

Which demon is that? I know it not, even from nursery stories.

Part Two of the Dark Tower series is much more accessible and entertaining than the first volume was (and longer, too, 480 pages versus just 264). We find Roland waking up on the beach after his confusing encounter with the man in black, just in time to (narrowly and with severe injuries) escape being eaten by giant lobsters, and follow him as he finds three marked doors through which he enters the minds of three New Yorkers (the Prisoner, the Lady of Shadows, and the Pusher), as well as New York itself, trying to assemble the team he needs in his quest for the Dark Tower.

From two thousand feet, where Claudette Sanders was taking a flying lesson, the town of Chester’s Mill gleamed in the morning light like something freshly made and just set down. Cars trundled along Main Street, flashing up winks of sun. The steeple of the Congo Church looked sharp enough to pierce the unblemished sky. The sun raced along the surface of Prestile Stream as the Seneca V overflew it, both plane and water cutting the town on the same diagonal course.
“Chuck, I think I see two boys beside the Peace Bridge! Fishing!” Her very delight made her laugh. The flying lessons were courtesy of her husband, who was the town’s First Selectman. Although of the opinion that if God had wanted man to fly, He would have given him wings, Andy was an extremely coaxable man, and eventually Claudette had gotten her way. She had enjoyed the experience from the first. But this wasn’t mere enjoyment; it was exhilaration.Today was the first time she had really understood what made flying great.What made it cool.
Chuck Thompson, her instructor, touched the control yoke gently, then pointed at the instrument panel. “I’m sure, ”he said, “but let’s keep the shiny side up, Claudie, okay?”
“Sorry, sorry.”
“Not at all.” He had been teaching people to do this for years, and he liked students like Claudie, the ones who were eager to learn something new.She might cost Andy Sanders some real money before long; she loved the Seneca, and had expressed a desire to have one just like it, only new. That would run somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars. Although not exactly spoiled, Claudie Sanders had undeniably expensive tastes which, lucky man, Andy seemed to have no trouble satisfying.
Chuck also liked days like this: unlimited visibility, no wind, perfect teaching conditions. Nevertheless, the Seneca rocked slightly as she overcorrected.
“You’re losing your happy thoughts. Don’t do that. Come to one-twenty.Let’s go out Route 119. And drop on down to nine hundred.”
She did, the Seneca’s trim once more perfect. Chuck relaxed.
They passed above Jim Rennie’s Used Cars, and then the town was behind them. There were fields on either side of 119, and trees burning with color. The Seneca’s cruciform shadow fled up the blacktop, one dark wing briefly brushing over an ant-man with a pack on his back. The ant-man looked up and waved. Chuck waved back, although he knew the guy couldn’t see him.
“Beautiful goddam day!” Claudie exclaimed. Chuck laughed.

Their lives had another forty seconds to run.

The two most remarkable things about this novel are ominous chapter-ending sentences like that one, and the big cast of characters, which warrants a two-page list of Notable Townspeople, Out-Of-Towners, and Dogs Of Note in the front matter.

Under the Dome is the story of the small town of Chester's Mill (Maine, unsurprisingly, this is after all a Stephen King novel), which is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. That force field is the only horror/science-fiction angle to this book, but the real horror and tragedy comes from how people in town act under this situation, so that it becomes more of a social study, something like a mixture of Lost and Lord of the Flies (both of which are mentioned). The people of Chester's Mill probably had a good chance to get through this in relatively good shape if they pulled themselves together, but instead they bring the worst human qualities to the table and all kinds of disaster upon themselves.

The secret is how to die.

Since the beginning of time, the secret had always been how to die.

The thirty-four-year-old initiate gazed down at the human skull cradled in his palms. The skull was hollow, like a bowl, filled with bloodred wine.

Drink it, he told himself. You have nothing to fear.

As was tradition, he had begun this journey adorned in the ritualistic garb of a medieval heretic being led to the gallows, his loose-fitting shirt gaping open to reveal his pale chest, his left pant leg rolled up to the knee, and his right sleeve rolled up to the elbow. Around his neck hung a heavy rope noose—a “cable-tow” as the brethren called it. Tonight, however, like the brethren bearing witness, he was dressed as a master.

If you enjoyed the two previous novels about Robert Langdon, you will feel right at home going through the Brownian Motion with him one more time as the symbologist is called from his home to hurry to the United States Capitol, only to find his friend and mentor Peter, the head of the Smithsonian Institution, who also happens to be a high-ranking Freemason, partly dismembered in the Capitol Rotunda, partly kidnapped by a tattooed castrate. Langdon has to embark on a frantic chase across Washington putting together clues left behind by the Founding Fathers, risking his life, as well as that of Peter's sister, who as a scientist in the esoteric field of Mind-over-Matter has just made earth-shattering discoveries, with the CIA and the Freemasons egging them on, and not just from the sidelines.

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions. It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway. Coaches and buckas had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.

In his foreword and introduction, Stephen King says that he set out to write an epic like The Lord of the Rings, with a feel to it like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. So what we get in this first part of the Dark Tower series is mostly about setting the atmosphere, with not a lot of things going on, and certainly more questions raised than answered.

Roland, the Gunslinger, travels across the desert of what clearly is a post-apocalyptic world, sparsely populated with people and mutants. There are artifacts from the time before the world had moved on, in the form of machinery and railways, but that world is probably not ours, because Roland's childhood memories (from almost an eternity ago) do not support that, and he later meets a boy Jake, who was in the moment of his death transported into Roland's world from what seems to be present-day New York, and the boy's account is foreign to Roland. After having crossed the desert and mountains, Roland finally catches up with the man in black he was chasing, and they have a long (ten years long) talk in which the incredible size of the universe is revealed to Roland, both in terms of galaxies and the space between them, as well as in terms of sub-atomic particles and the space between those. Apparently, it all comes together at the Dark Tower, the ultimate target of Roland's quest, and currently controlled by the man in black's master.

I am intrigued (or confused) enough to likely pick up the second volume when I come across it (I got this one from a street vendor for 10 RMB, about 1.12 Euro, which makes me think that it was not an official print. The first page said that a book without cover is stolen property, but a cover it had, and except for the foreword and introduction, all pages appeared in the right order as well).

It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second birthday. When, as usual, the flower was delivered, he took off the wrapping paper and then picked up the telephone to call Detective Superintendent Morell who, when he retired, had moved to Lake Siljan in Dalarna. They were not only the same age, they had been born on the same day–which was something of an irony under the circumstances. The old policeman was sitting with his coffee, waiting, expecting the call.

Mikael Blomkvist is an investigative journalist, trying to uncover the corruption and incompetence in the financial sector and the branch of journalism that reports on it. That has made him unpopular with both his colleagues and the wealthy (and thus powerful) individuals he attacks. A court conviction for libel forces him to take a break (including a stint in prison), so he decides to move (or is talked into moving) to a small island inhabited by the Vanger clan, one of Sweden's wealthiest old-money families, under the pretense to ghostwrite an autobiography for the aging Vanger scion, but with the real mission of finding the murderer of Vanger's niece, who disappeared over forty years ago. He gets help from Lisbeth Salander, a young, pierced, tattooed and obviously troubled private investigator (and computer hacker).

The main characters seem to be based on Larsson's own life, who himself was an editor of an investigative magazine, and an activist against right-wing and racist organizations. The unpleasant topic of the book is sexual violence against women, with Lisbeth Salander at the center, named after the victim of a brutal rape that Larsson witnessed in his youth. The only reason that I did not immediately buy the two sequels is that I need something more light-hearted to go in between.

This is the first book in Larsson's Millennium (named after Blomkvist's magazine) trilogy, it was published in 2005 and made him the world's second best-selling author of 2008. Its two sequels are called The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, so that we can expect Lisbeth to play a central role in them as well. All three books have been turned into movies in Sweden and a Hollywood version (Daniel Craig, directed by David Fincher) is in production right now. Unfortunately, Larsson himself cannot enjoy his recent fame, because he passed away in 2004 (at the age of 50, and according to Wikipedia of natural causes, not related to the death threats brought against him because of his work), leaving behind the three unpublished manuscripts. There are apparently also three quarters of a fourth novel and potentially outlines for a fifth and sixth of what he seems to have intended as a ten book series.

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows—only hard with luminous edges—and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said "my universe:" but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things.

In such a country, you will perceive at once that it is impossible that there should be anything of what you call a "solid" kind; but I dare say you will suppose that we could at least distinguish by sight the Triangles, Squares, and other figures, moving about as I have described them. On the contrary, we could see nothing of the kind, not at least so as to distinguish one figure from another. Nothing was visible, nor could be visible, to us, except Straight Lines; and the necessity of this I will speedily demonstrate.

Place a penny on the middle of one of your tables in Space; and leaning over it, look down upon it. It will appear a circle.

But now, drawing back to the edge of the table, gradually lower your eye (thus bringing yourself more and more into the condition of the inhabitants of Flatland), and you will find the penny becoming more and more oval to your view, and at last when you have placed your eye exactly on the edge of the table (so that you are, as it were, actually a Flatlander) the penny will then have ceased to appear oval at all, and will have become, so far as you can see, a straight line.

Flatland is written in the form of a letter from an inhabitant (a square, to be exact) of the two-dimensional world of Flatland. He first describes how he perceives his world using a very limited (compared to ours) sense of vision, combined with hearing and touch. After that he explains the social structure and history of the Flatlanders, a part that holds some pointed and funny satire, which could make the novella interesting for those not so inclined to enjoy the more mathematical musings. In next part, our narrator tells how he once visited the one-dimensional Lineland, the none-dimensional Pointland, our own three-dimensional Spaceland, and finally how he concludes from these experiences that there should be ad infinitum even more dimensions beyond that, dimensions that will be as difficult for us to understand and accept as it was for the Linelanders to understand Flatland, and for the Flatlanders the third dimension.

I found this novella very inspiring. It almost makes me want to try learn some graphics programming, in order to make little games that simulate how a Flatlander must perceive his world. There are a couple of computer games based on Flatland already (this Flash game looks really cool), but they all seem to present the world in a bird's eye view, which arguably makes it more accessible. I will also try to watch the recent movie and short film adaptations and see what take they have on the visuals.