Hampton Roads Book Sale!

In my free time, I volunteer at Reach, a non-profit that provides read-aloud programs and book donations to homeless and at-risk children in the Hampton Roads area. Reach is hosting a book sale this Saturday. If you happen to live in the area, stop by and fill a bag for $10!

You can learn more about Reach and its programs to support child literacy at www.reachreads.org

Super-Size My Kindle

Amazon announced today the new, large-screen Kindle DX. It will be released this summer, and will cost $489 (vs. the $359 6-inch 2.0). As you can see below, it boasts a larger body and a 9.7 inch diagonal screen.

This is a perfect example of Amazon giving me what I asked for, in a way that I dislike. I've always maintained that the one thing I would change about my Kindle (I have verson 1.0) is the screen size. It's smaller than ideal, and this is something that was not changed in version 2.0. 

However - I would not purchase the DX because, to me, the larger screen size is not enough of a positive to outweigh the major negative of a larger device.  The other new features - native PDF and a rotating screen - are nice, but again, not significant enough to outweigh the disadvantages of the larger size. I'd prefer to keep my lightweight laptop for dealing with full-page display documents. And the final promotional feature, of larger memory, is a non-issue for 1st generation Kindlers like me, because ours support a removable memory card (v. 2.0 does not).

Of the things I like about my Kindle, the size and portability is probably either #1 or #2 on the list. With its current shape and size, I can slip my Kindle into a small bag or even the (large) pocket of a jacket.  

If Amazon would create a v. 3.0 6 inch Kindle with a larger vertical screen (likely compensated by a smaller or digital keyboard), I would be all for it. This attempt, though, is not for me.

(image pulled from theKindle DX page on Amazon.com)

BBC Books List

I pulled this from my friend Lea and figured it would be fun to see how I measure up!
Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X +
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X +
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible- X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X +
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot X
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh *
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X (doesn't this count under #33?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne *
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X (twice - and I have to say, I was underwhelmed both times).
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving X
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins *
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon X
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X +
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon *
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Naboko *
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas *
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac *
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie *
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens *
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson *
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens*
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker *
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X +

Reading Rainbow

I read an encouraging, and very well-written, article lately on one of the blogs I follow, Dangerous Intersection.

The National Endowment for the Arts recently announced an increase in the reading habits of Americans, the first such increase in over twenty years.

The author's commentary echoes my own thoughts in its excitement and relief at this important indicator. Like the author, I've never been able to fully understand the lack of motivation to read. Certainly, I've had friends who spend their time and energy on other activities, and I can understand how there are other ways to obtain information in our digital age, but books are special and unique in a way that other media simply isn't. Unlike television programming, which caters to the masses, the majority of literature isn't written to an agenda, a political end, or to meet the societally-acceptable standards of its time. In fact, frequently books are written to counteract these very concepts.

From a more selfish perspective, I don't think I can put it better than the author:

"Reading, I believe, is the best way we have to gain access to the world short of physically immersing ourselves in different places and cultures. Even for those who have the opportunity and resource to travel that extensively, reading provides a necessary background for the many places that will be otherwise inaccessibly alien to our sensibilities."

Kindle 2.0

I came across these photos of the (apparent) second-generation Kindle. It looks nice - slightly more ipod-esque in shape and feel - although I still feel that the screen is too small and the keyboard takes up too much space.

Check them out here:

I'll keep my lovely first generation for awhile yet. I definitely recommend the Kindle, though, for all voracious readers and especially for travelers!

Adult Material

I've been really enjoying various works of Young Adult fiction lately. I find the stories to be extremely compelling and direct in a way that standard fiction is sometimes not.

Today, I read a great quote by Steven Moffat that really speaks to this fact:

"The misconception about children's fiction is that it's lightweight or fluffy. It's about really big and important things. It's adults who like light and fluffy. Everything is big and important to a child, [so] their stories are about big and important events."

Poetry

Sometimes when I'm reading, I come across a phrase with a beauty that strikes me, and takes me out of the reading experience. Sometimes it makes me contemplative, other times sad, or emotionally in sync with the author.

While reading World Made By Hand, I encountered one of these phrases:

"The old high school complex itself was a 1970's-vintage modernist monstrosity, a U-shaped set of low-slung rectilinear boxes like ten thousand other schools around the nation from the period. Seeing the building usually made me deeply sad and even a little angry, the way that refrigerator in my garden did. Its vision of yesterday's tomorrow seemed pitiful."

It's vision of yesterday's tomorrow...

It's such an evocative phrase. It made me stop and think - what will tomorrow's people think of our vision of their present? What visions do we have today of our tomorrows that are similarly pitiful? How can we as humanity rise above the limitations we set for ourselves, and the restricted futures we dream of?