Islands in the stream; strawberries and cream

Last week Scott Pack mentioned on his blog that he’d taken a couple of location-specific books with him on holiday to the Isle of Wight.

I too am off on holiday soon, and not that I’m lucky enough to be heading to a tropical island—last time I looked south Devon was neither tropical, nor and an island—but I’m just finishing up with Robinson Crusoe (on the Kindle, Tim) and have also indulged in a hardback copy of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet, which I’ve lined up next. It’s a coincidental quirk, but, without having read The Thousand Autumns… etc.  I’m assuming there are similarities between it and Defoe’s classic, both in historical setting and in the situations the lead characters come up against. In other words, they are complementary books.

So what I’m getting at, in a roundabout fashion, is asking you this: What two books would you recommend that go together like strawberries and cream? (I would say like peas in a pod, but don’t want to set Aliya back any steps on the road to recovery.)

The only rule is recommended books aren’t allowed to be by the same author, or a second author picking up characters from the first, a la Wide Sargasso Sea or Roger Morris’ Inspector Porfiry series.

PS Talking of Scott, Happy Birthday Bookswap.

Talking tables

Sadie Jones, she of The Outcast fame, talks writing and common sense over on Untitled Books.

Woof woof

My top five non-fiction books on canine companions, given that a certain someone is going to be sharing her home with a certain something soon:

Don't Shoot The Dog, Karen Pryor - this one's not really about dogs. It's about animal training using cognitive learning and positive reinforcement. Pryor was a dolphin and this book is the one that brought clicker-training out of the pool and into the obedience ring, and is a proponent of the nice rather than nasty approach to animal training. If you're wondering whether you'd like to give it a go, it reads a little like Malcolm Gladwell's cod-science books, so if you can happily read The Tipping Point and Outliers, this should be fine for you.

For similar behaviourist-edged writing, but more on traits and less on training, see also Stanley's Coren's The Intelligence of Dogs, which is one of the few places to say sensible things about breed traits.

The Philosopher and the Wolf, Mark Rowlands - I read this last year and mentioned it on the Veggiebox. Much like a canid, Rowlands is self-obsessed but not selfish. His arrogant, egotistical tone takes a bit of getting used to, but is commendable for its honesty and quite refreshing. Here's what Aimee Shalan over on the Guardian made of the book.

King Soloman's Ring, Konrad Lorenz - This is like a blend of the two books I mention above, insofar as it is a scientific book, but concerned with the topic of what it is to be an animal. There are more geese than dogs in it, but it has a lot of personality, and a strong sense of time and place to the anecdotes, which add to the interest. Lorenz was one of the fore-runners of modern ethology, which is where my own main area of interest in animal psychology lies. Lorenz won the Nobel Prize for Science and Medicine in 1973.

The Hidden Life of Dogs, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. I've only just found out that Marshall Thomas is actually a novelist. I'm keen to check out her. She's one of the modern breed of ethologist. This book is about the development of a pack of dogs, including a dingo or two, she shared her life with. Hers and Rowlands' are the most pleasurable reads here, great books regardless of their subject matter. I'd actually highly recommend The Tribe of Tiger, her book on cat behaviour, but as we were talking dogs here...

I'm getting that Kindling feeling...

The honest truth about my Kindle is that I love it.

Scott Pack has been blogging about his over the last week or so too. I reckon I probably prefer it a bit more than he does, but that's not to say he thinks it's without its merits. Go take a look after you've read this. His latest post is a comparison with the Sony Reader, which might help anyone (Matt) who's considering buying an e-Reader.

I own a batch of books I love, that I'll go back to again and again and the books as objects have sentimental value. There are maybe fifty or so of them. Other books I generally give away, or they end up dusty in the loft. So from now on, that collection won't grow as much as it did. I'll be using ebooks instead, especially for my commute, for which the Kindle is ideal.

What's so good about the Kindle? The main advantage over a computer (or phone or netbook, or, yes, iPad), is that, like all the other eReaders, it uses digital ink rather than a LCD or Plasma display, which is pretty much print-quality text on a screen. (If you've not seen e-ink in action before, it looks like someone has pasted some actual printed text on an acetate to a screen.) Reading from it really is a very similar experience to reading from print (except for light reflection on the screen in dim light.)

I've tried out the Sony Reader and the Sony Reader Touch in a couple of bookshops before, and also the horrible BeBook. Aesthetically, some people, like Scott, prefer the Sony product, some the Amazon. I side with Amazon. But the real advantage of the Kindle over the Sony devices--at least at the moment for UK users--is the Kindle has wireless access to Amazon's Whispernet (using a bunch of wireless networks, including 3G), which means you can use the Kindle without the need for a computer (other than the initial setting up of an Amazon account).

This is getting a bit wordy, so let's try some bulletpoints:

Why I like the Kindle:

• Easy to hold and don't need to hold pages open with your hand
• Shorter width of the page than a standard paperback means faster reading
• No headaches or eyestrain, unlike using an LCD screen
• Can hold thousands of books
• Wireless connection
• Can store other file types (although I think a USB stick or iPod Shuffle is better suited to this, it's good for emergencies)
• Free wireless inbox
• No distractions from other programmes (such as email) while you're reading

I'm also in the middle of editing a good few hundreds of pages of work. The Kindle has saved having to print these out for the final read-throughs, as you can also use the (not-magnificent) keyboard to annotate the work if you crunch it into mobipocket format.

So there you go, my tuppenny worth on using an ereader device. There're lots of other points to consider from the point-of-view of an author, and from the point-of-view of the publishing industry, but more on that another time.

(Bonus points to anyone who can spot the TV reference in the title of this post.)

I won't get that time back OR Come on, come on, come on, get through it...

So Aliya's given up on Wolf Hall. Like she says, she's not usually a quitter.

I managed to get through One Hundred Years of Solitude and Lark Rise to Candleord and am glad I made it, but I did abandon Le Carre's The Naive And Sentimental Lover to the whimsy of the London Transport system, and have been put off reading any more of his work. And David Hebblethwaite has just convinced me to steer clear of Oryx & Crake and The Year of the Flood by damning them with faint praise. There are scores of other similarly abandoned and never reads littering my past. But maybe I should have persevered with some (Do I really need to read Tender is the Night? The writing is beautiful but the characters--muh.) and not bothered to finish some of the others--I'm looking at you Richard Beard's The Cartoonist.

What books have you wasted time on--and wish you hadn't--and are there any you started, but didn't finish, but have a niggling suspicion maybe you should have?

Bookcrossing

I've only just found out about bookcrossing

Great idea, and good for authors too. I'm all signed up now.

American date format for registering by the way

Special superpowers

I know Aliya can tap a mean shoe, but I'm rather limited in the superhero talent league. Possibly the poorest superpower known to humanity, I never use a bookmark or--shudder--dogear a page but can always flip directly to the last page I was reading, even with month-long or more periods between reading. Amazing, isn't it?