I recently received an Amazon Kindle as a gift from thoughtful family members. The good stuff:

• The display is very nice to read in good light (better than paper, I think).
• The form factor is quite good. One-handed reading is a joy (and easier than with a thick paperback), and very doable in crowded environments (like public transit).
• Battery life is good (up to two weeks of commute-time WiFi-disabled use).
• The Kindle Leather Cover has a very nice feel to it that is superior to a plain paperback.
• Multi-book storage is great. I used to have the problem of finishing a book on my way in to work, leaving myself nothing to read on the way home. The Kindle makes that problem go away.

The bad stuff (and these are really mostly minor):

• The lack of obvious weatherproofing doesn’t leave me with a feeling of confidence. A paperback will easily handle a wait for the train in morning drizzly fog. I’m not so sure the Kindle is up to that task.
• In dim light, I think paper is easier to read (although things are already quite difficult to read at this point).
• Sprint and AT&T don’t really have anything to fear as far as data traffic is concerned. Book-purchase traffic is probably paid for by Amazon. Web browsing on the Kindle is just way too painful. The bandwidth itself is fine, but the display refresh rate is so slow as to be unusable. Kindles will not be replacing iPhones for portable web browsing any time soon. The only interesting terms-of-service-violating hack I can think of would be using the Kindle as some kind of tethering device.
• The slow display also makes page-flipping painful. Occasionally I will want to flip backwards to earlier pages to reread a paragraph or two. With a paperback, that is no problem. With the Kindle, flipping pages is almost painfully slow (1-2s per “page turn”). I really don’t see this as a viable textbook replacement.
• You lose some of the fun of a colorful book cover. It used to be interesting to see what other commuters were reading, but these days, as I see more people using Kindles and iPhones as reading devices, I think all reading commuters appear very homogeneous.
• At some point in time, my grubby hands will leave my white-plastic Kindle smeared with unattractive grubby little prints.

The economics of a Kindle purchase are quite compelling for avid readers of new books (Kindle e-books are typically priced at $9.99 or lower), but they are not as compelling for readers like me who buy used books or who frequent the public library.

The slow display is occasionally annoying in the rare page-flipping sessions, but otherwise, the form factor and multi-book storage easily overcome these minor shortcomings to make the Kindle a real winner.

This book fails to live up to the gun-porn action suggested by the two balaclava-clad machine-gun-toting troopers on the yellow-on-red book cover. As one might guess from the cover, a hostage is taken, and violence ensues. I won’t go into the “plot” because this book is over three years old (2006); “plot” summaries can be easily found elsewhere on the web.

The viewer of this cover might reasonably expect to read lots of text like, oh I don’t know,

The three 9mm rounds fired in rapid succession lifted his body upwards and backwards into the wall; he fell and settled, sitting, like a life-sized Kevlar-wearing rag doll.

(Yes, I wrote that myself, on the spot.)

The failed promise is that out of 750 pages, the reader (me, with the protagonist) encounters only three pages’ worth of shots fired in anger, none fired by the protagonist, and none fired at the protagonist.

My (other) gripes about this book:

• The Hostage, at 750 pages, is too inconveniently unwieldy to carry in my commuter bag for my ride to work.
• The garish primary yellow-on-red color scheme draws attention to me. But let’s just say that the ladies don’t walk up to me asking what I’m reading.

After finally completing this book, I did some research and found that Griffin’s style is to highlight the behind-the-scenes bureaucratic and logistical gymnastics that must precede the expected Kevlar-wearing-rag-doll-yielding operations. Instead of gun-porn, we get pages and pages of West Wing-style dialogue and bureaucratic shenanigans, which people apparently pay good money to read.

Samurai Boogie by Peter Tasker is essentially an anime graphic novel in book form. The story itself is fun, something one might expect to read in a graphic novel or see in an action movie. The reader essentially follows around an old grizzled private eye as he deals with Yakuza gangsters, rich and powerful politicians, and other assorted characters.

When 24 the TV show first came out, it had a novel gimmick: the show would cut to a split screen format and show events simultaneously unfold in different parts of the story in “real time”. Over time, that gimmick went away; it remains only in the teaser leading and ending clips just before and after commercial breaks.

Samurai Boogie has a gimmick of its own. The text for the first few pages reads like the text of a graphic novel: short terse semi-sentences, leaving the reader free to draw the frame in his mind:

At the top of the stairs, a logn corridor. At the end, a sliding door with panels of translucent paper. Behind it, a hunched silhouette. Human, male.

Mori takes a half-step backwards. A floorboard groans. The silhouette stays motionless. So does Mori. Stillness. The only soudn the patter of the rain.

Go forward or back? Mori’s instincts decide. He moves down the corridor like a cat, slow motion, rolling his weight over each step forward. At the sliding door, he waits a lifetime. Then his fingernails open a millimetre of light; he lines his eye to the crack.

The gimmick is fun for a chapter or two, but Tasker thankfully backs off and allows the story to tell itself without gimmicky narration.

I like to buy used books for $3 or less. For every few stinkers like W.E.B. Griffin Special Ops, I get a gem like Doppelganger by David Stahler, Jr.

The fact that it was $3 should have been a good signal that it would be good. As a counter-example, I await with trepidation a 1066-page $1 copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth.

Doppelganger is a short 258-page read; I finished this book in one week of Muni time. I can’t say much about the plot without spoiling it since the story is very very tight, but the story contains what I would expect a good book noir to contain:

• Enough to make me disappointed that Muni is running on time, for once. For comparison, there were days when I’d rather stand amidst a horde of zombie commuters than work my way through another chapter of Special Ops.
• A nice, tight noir plot, with a complementary completely unresolved ending. Good book noir is everything that formulaic weekly television is not: no episodic stories that are neatly resolved within a neat 30- or 60-minute time slot.

I suppose Doppelganger’s story could be described as putting Smeagol into a John Cusack story, in book form.

The sequel was less-satisfying than its predecessor, but these days (and even those days; The Fall of Hyperion was written in 1990), that hardly surprises.

I borrowed the book for free from a friend, so I can’t complain about the cost. And I read it on the Muni, so I can’t complain about lost time.

(Spoilers ahead.)

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Dan Simmon’s Hyperion marks the first book I’ve completed completely on public-transit time, about 1½ work-weeks of commuting, about 50 minutes each way (total 1½ hours per day). It is the kind of science-fantasy space opera I like to read when I want to kill time.

On its own, the Hyperion has everything: romance, sci-fi military action, spaceships, alien races, and time travel. It is nominally a book about a group of seven people traveling together on a pilgrimage.

However, in the context of all the other books I’ve read (probably an unreasonable judgment to make), the book’s story uses the very clichéd device of having the travelers tell their stories to all the others, the series of stories punctuated by brief intermissions of travel incidents. By the time everyone has told their story, the book is over, and no forward progress has been made towards the end of the originally-offered plotline (you have to buy the sequel to get that).

Each of the stories is interesting to read, but I finished the book feeling more like I had read a bunch of novellas or short stories (The Bachman Books), instead of the expected epic space opera (The Stand).

But I do have the sequel (The Fall of Hyperion), and many bus rides ahead of me.

Now I’m only 8 years behind on my reading.

I liked the Sorcerer’s Stone better.

My comparison is much akin to that between the “first” (episodes IV-VI) and “third” (episodes I-III) trilogies of Star Wars. In IV-VI, we have simple good-vs.-evil stories. Then in I-III, we have more complicated stories about politics and disputes over trade routes.

The Chamber of Secrets is undoubtedly a darker story, but I can’t help but think it could have done so without introducing the complications of “governors” and the “board” and politics behind appointing the head of Hogwart’s. The Sorcerer’s Stone had child protagonists more in the vein of the Hardy Boys or Scooby-Doo; The Chamber of Secrets felt more desperate in having to resort to a child hero.

I’m about 10 years behind on my reading.

I saw the movie first. I liked the book better. I know they’re supposed to be children’s books, but I couldn’t help but feel they were too much Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-ish. On the plus side, I didn’t have to read pages and pages of oompa-loompa lyrics.

What a coincidence from the company lending library! The acknowledgements page of Robert Buettner’s Orphanage references Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (believe it or not, all these books really were just grabbed off the shelf).

So does the rest of the book. It is a decent read, but it follows the same formula of the above-referenced works:

• A juvenile delinquent gets shipped off to basic training; dramatic boot-camp accident straightens him out.
• More nifty exoskeletons.
• Humanity fighting a hive-mind enemy.
• A twist at the end.

But … whereas the earlier two books seemed OK on their own, Orphange seemed formulaic, more derived from those works than influenced by them.

One of the cool things about my current workplace is the “lending library”: employees just drop off and pick up books. And since this is a high-tech company populated by geeks like me, the reading selection is heavily skewed towards my interests: science-fiction, fantasy, and Tom Clancy (in addition to the correctly-assumed collection of technical books).

Last weekend I read The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I intended it to last me my plane flight out and back; it was disappointing only because after the first chapter I got sucked into what I thought would be an epic space opera, only to finish the book before the plane landed at my destination, leaving me with no book for the flight back home. It has some neat ideas about interstellar warfare, in particular, time dilation, which figures prominently in Ender’s Game.

Yesterday I picked up Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein, also a quick read (I finished it last night). After chasing down Heinlein, the book, and the movie (Wikipedia is great for this kind of thing), I’ve decided I like both the book and the movie, each on their own merits. The movie is standard Paul Verhoeven fare, emphasizing the romance and action (with an essentially Aryan cast) at the expense of Heinlein’s philosophy (and ethnically-diverse cast). Heinlein’s book, despite being written in 1959, has ideas in it that are still very cool even now (in particular, the mobile exoskeleton).

What struck me most was the similarity between the books (well, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, but I haven’t read anything in a very long time). They both, in the first person, follow the main character’s path through:

• Basic military training (emphasizing the difficulties of operating a powered exoskeleton) and graduation.
• Some episodic R&R and temporary “return” to (and rejection of) civilian life.
• An indefinite term of military service in a species-vs.-species war to extinction.
• A twist at the end. Their respective twists aren’t even really Old Boy- or Sixth Sense-caliber, but they are “twisty” enough to warrant “no spoiler” protection.