Christopher Moore’s Blog

Your author guy is going to be on Live Wire radio, Saturday, June 21st, at 8:00 pm.
Details at:
http://www.livewireradio.org/
I have no idea what to expect. Sounds like it could be like Prairie Home Companion.

Until I figure out how to embed a movie here, check out the MySpace blog post:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=95547714&blogID=406520022&indicate=1
Here’s the first installment of the LONG VERSION. I’m guessing this takes fifteen minutes or so to look at. The remaining 300 photos tomorrow:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=95547714&blogID=406552439
COMMENTS: http://bbs.chrismoore.com/viewtopic.php?p=202963#202963

Let’s face it. I’m a gadget guy. I like shiny new machines, sometimes because they are shiny and new. I have an Iphone, an Xbox360, 2 Playstations, two Macs, five PCs (4 of which I built), 3 flat-screen TVs, 2 Tivos, 4 Ipods, 3 Digital SLRs, 4 digital point and shoot cameras — well, you get the idea. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a luddite, or anti-technical. I am not averse to change, nor am I nostalgic for the “old days” that never really existed. Neither am I evangelical about technology – I don’t have any unnatural affection for my Macs, and I don’t have any built-in revulsion for my PCs, or vice-versa. I like stuff that works, and I get pissed off at stuff that doesn’t. Okay. Just so we’re clear.
So, despite my misgivings about E-books, which I’ll go into in a whole different blog, I bought a Kindle from Amazon. My history with the electronic book reader is this: I tried to demo the Sony reader three different times in various book stores and there was never one that worked long enough to actually tell what it was like. But it was obvious that electronic paper had some possibilities.
Then, about two months ago, Amazon’s Kindle PR division contacted me and asked me to do a blog for them, which I linked to here. I started looking into the Kindle machine, reading reviews, asking friends, checking out the specs. After all, you couldn’t sign on to Amazon without being hit in the face with another Kindle promotion, and I sign onto Amazon a lot. (Note ridiculously long gadget list above.) So, even through Amazon had sent Kindles to my friends Neil Gaiman and Daniel Handler for review, and not to me, and I had done a blog for them (for fucking nothing, despite the fact that I actually get paid to do this – a lot) I ordered a Kindle. And eight hours later (I’m not kidding, eight hours) they lowered the price by $50.
So, you know, good start. So, here are my observations. And yes, this does go on a bit.
First, the good:
Kindle delivers available books in about 60 seconds through a free cellular data network, anywhere in the country. It’s fast, there’s a pretty good selection, and the screen is easy to read, with scalable fonts. It’s light, and the battery supposedly lasts a pretty long time, as power is only required to turn/change a page, not show text (it’s not back lit). They ship it with a very nice leather cover, that almost completely negates the size and weight advantage, but does protect the Kindle if it’s strapped in, and you can surf the internet, search Amazon products, and subscribe to and read blogs, magazines, and newspapers that are available from Amazon. You can also mail Word or other text documents to yourself and for ten cents a piece, Amazon will convert them to Kindle format and send them to your Kindle. These are all cool things. With a cheap SD memory card, you could easily carry 200 books with you in this little machine, and it highlights, clips, makes notes and bookmarks text.
Which means that the Kindle is not a complete P.O.S. It is, however, at least in this generation, a partial P.O.S.
The Not So Good: 1. No place to hold it. Every place you grab it does something — activates some function.

2. No page numbers. They have reference numbers, but not actually page numbers. There’s no way to find something or tell someone else how to find it. If you change font size, the reference numbers change. So, for instance, you might say, “Oh my God, there’s the funniest line in that new Sedaris book!” “Really, what page is it on?” “Uh, 2023 of 4432 in the second biggest font.” “Oh, yeah, that means something to me.”

3. There’s no place to clip the light they sell you to clip on it, and without the light, it’s dark. Of course you can clip it to the cover they sell you but…

4. It falls out of the cover. There’s a tiny “ledge” that’s supposed to keep the Kindle in place, but it doesn’t work. Yes, I could put a piece of stick-on velcro on the back and solve this problem, but I just paid $400 for this thing, I shouldn’t have to add velcro to make it functional.

5. It shuts down. I took it to Los Angeles for a weekend trip. I’d charged it before I left, and it’s supposed to be good for 7000 “page turns” on a charge, but even with the wireless off, it just stuck on a page on the second day, so I had nothing to read. I’ve never had a real book, “lock up”.
6. Reading on the screen is disorienting. I read a lot on a screen, more than I read on paper, but reading a novel on a screen is disorienting. The screen is still pretty small, and a full page of text from a book isn’t displayed. You never have a feel of how far along you are in a book. You don’t know how far from the end of the chapter you are. There is a little line of “progress dots” along the bottom of the page that’s supposed to indicate how far along you are, but it doesn’t feel “real”. It think if you could make it default to page numbers that mirror the real book, and you knew you were on page 44 of 400, you’d have a better idea. The progress numbers aren’t always right, either. I loaded the manuscript of my new book into it. The reference numbers keep showing things like, 2483 out of 98. Which, you know, is confusing.

So, the Kindle, in my opinion, just isn’t quite there. And understand, I think there’s a certain inevitability to electronic books, so this is not a rant against the form. For some things, particularly college courses, I think e-books could rock hard. But until there’s a generation who has never read or worked with paper books, the “analog” aspect of the reader has to be a lot better. You’ve got to somehow simulate the good things about paper books (and I don’t mean the smell or the fact that you can tear the pages out and wipe with them if you’re stuck dropping dooky in the woods), while taking advantage of the assets of e-books.
I’ll have a whole new blog on e-books soon, in which we’ll explore how you can decorate your garage to accommodate your own homeless author guy, who just got Napstered out of a job.
Meanwhile, e-book owners, share your thoughts.
COMMENTS: http://bbs.chrismoore.com/viewtopic.php?p=202482#202482

So, people are always asking me what I’m reading. And usually, I’m reading something for research, or some book someone has sent me for a jacket comment. (I have a two-foot stack of books on my desk right now that I’d love to read and comment on, but then, I would never be able to write another book.) It’s an occupational hazzard or just a hazzard of life, I guess. There are more books to read than you’ll ever have time to read. But when I was in Europe last month, doing a whole month on a couple of carry-on bags, I could only carry one book at a time, and since I was in Italy most of the time, there were very limited English language titles I could buy. So I got to read some books for fun that I might not have picked up otherwise.
First, I was in Siena, a very cool Medieval City in Northern Italy, when I ran out of reading material and so I picked up Northern Lights, the first book in Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series. It’s a young adult fantasy, and I have some trouble getting engaged in some YA titles, but I absolutely loved this book. (The Golden Compass film was adapted from it, but I hadn’t see it yet, fortunately.) I was never able to finish a Harry Potter book for some reason, although I could certainly see the appeal. But here, for the first time in a long time, I was completely lost in the story. (Perhaps because I was trying to drown out the sound of Italian guys on cell phones on trains. Travel note: Italian guys never shut up. Ever. If they are awake and there’s not food in their mouths, they are talking. Especially if there’s a woman around. I wanted to have a T-shirt made with the letters S.T.F.U. and point to it in these situations, because clearly, even with 3000 years of civilization, they have never learned to Shut The Fuck Up.) Anyway, giant armored talking polar bears. Yes! Northern Lights creates a very rich, alternative world that looks much like early 20th Century England, only more steam-punky, but the main thing you need to know is: Giant Talking Armored Polar Bears. Sure there’s a cute and spunky little Pippi Longstockingesce girl, there are Dickinsean street urchins (which you can now order n sushi bars in London – they are served with English hot mustard instead of wasabi) and a hydrogen-stealing zeppelin pirate, (a species rumored to have once existed in the Castro in San Francisco), but they had me at Giant Talking Armored Polar Bears. Hijinks ensue. (I’m reading the second book in the series now on the Kindle, which sucks ass in so many ways I don’t have time or room to enumerate them, so I don’t know if it’s any good or not because I can’t get past dealing with the stupid machine.)
So then I read Heat, by Bill Buford, which is sub titled: An Amateur’s Adventures ans a Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. It’s about working in restaurants, but it’s also about learning about food, about obsession, about the restaurant business, a biography of Mario Batali, and an overall history of Italian cooking. This is a terrific non-fictuon book that I probably would have never finished if I hadn’t been traveling, and I would have been poorer for having missed it. Buford is a talented writer, but also has the ability to humble himself as a student, which makes him a good teacher. I learned a lot about food, about restaurants (and I used to work in them) and about Italy. If you eat, you should read this book.
I picked up Michael Chabon’s book, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union in Verona. Chabon doesn’t need me to sell his ability as a writer, he’s won tons of awards, including a Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. This book, however, I think is my favorite. It’s a noir mystery, so Chabon gets to show off his ability to turn a phrase, but it’s also a very high-concept alternative-history, wherein the state of Israel was not established in 1949, but the Jews from the post-war diaspora were relocated to a colony in Sitka, Alaska. So you have a detective story peopled entirely with people who speak in a Yiddish idiom, intermingled with Tlinglet Indians, one of whom, a giant, is raised at the adopted son of the main character, and so is a practicing Jew, right down to his yarmulke and the fringe of his garment. It makes for an extraordinarily interesting story, peppered with Judica and hard-boiled kvetching. If you’re Jewish, you really need to read this book, but if you’re not, you’ll probably learn something in addition to being entertained.
Finally, I read a book off of my “read for comment” pile that I chose because it would fit in my computer bag. Captain Freedom, by G. Xavier Robillard, is a very funny send-up of the super-hero genre. I won’t go into detail because it won’t be out until early next year, but leave it at: “it’s a hybrid of The Tick and Mark Leyner’s, Et Tu Babe. Very sharp, funny social satire. Meanwhile, you can check out G.’s Blog at http://www.alldaycoffee.net/
Comments: http://bbs.chrismoore.com/viewtopic.php?t=15090