After, I started flipping through it, looking back at past years. There were quite a few books I’d forgotten about, a lot that I had remembered the plot to but couldn’t remember the title, and more than a few I think I want to re-read at some point. Other things, like why I had written “lupus?” in the margin beside Gil Adamson’s Outlander or where exactly did the quote about the head in the jar come from¹ and which title-less Suzanne Brockmann book was I referring to when I wrote “almost as good as Troubleshooters books”², puzzle me. And then there are all the different pens, the handwriting, short vs. long descriptions, funny comments – basically, it was a big long trip down memory lane.

But then I got to 2009. Sad, neglected 2009. I only managed to chronicle about half the year, and there are a couple of post-it notes with acronyms I can assume are the titles of books which I intended to memorialize, but never did. There are books I am certain I read last year but aren’t there, and it makes me sad that I didn’t record them and some of them are most certainly lost to me now.

This has given me a renewed sense of responsibility to keep up with my book chronicling. I did a little at the beginning of the year, and now that I remember how important it is to me, how important it is to remember what I have read, I will be more diligent in recording my reading habits.

While this normally wouldn’t have been celebratory news in the past, merely part of a monthly update, I’ve been reading a lot less physical books lately. I totally blame the general increase in the amount of knitting I do; whenever I have a few minutes or am waiting in line, I’m more likely to whip out one of the many socks or mittens I’ve got on the go as opposed to an actual book.

It’s a cyclical thing, too. Sometimes it’s hard to find anything good to read or that captures my attention. February through April were dry months for me, in terms of finding something to stick with. I started several, and tossed them back after only a few chapters. This one that I just finished almost got tossed back, but I stuck with it – it was a fantasy novel, set in present day London, about a sorcerer who has been reincarnated. My library has the sequel, but I can’t find it on the shelf (probably due to just not looking carefully, likely due to it being checked out already). I’d put a hold on it, but I have another stack of TBRs waiting to audition.

A few weeks ago, a friend and former library school classmate posted about acquiring a Kobo e-reader. I have seen these things in person, and they are as easy to use as she describes. They are light, portable and the screen is easy to look at. The other nice thing about them is that you can read any document (or ebook) which is in the PDF format – meaning, you can purchase ebooks in other places as long as they are in the PDF format and use them on your Kobo.

(This was always my beef with the Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader: the books were in a proprietary format which couldn’t be used on any other e-reader, and you couldn’t read ebooks that weren’t that format on the Kindle. Oh, and it wasn’t available in Canada. Now it is, and now you can read PDFs on it, but you still can’t read Amazon ebooks on other devices, as far as I can tell. Also it does have a wireless connection, so there’s that too.)

When it comes to ebook readers and platforms, I’m something of an overachiever. I have a Sony eBook Reader (more about that in a sec), three separate ebook readers on my iPod (Ereader, Stanza ² and Kobo) and two e-reader platforms on my laptop (Adobe Digital Editions and Mobipocket). It would take charts, spreadsheets and interpretive dance to explain what works with what, but here goes nothing:

• Ereader and Mobipocket don’t work with anything else. Ebooks I buy in those formats can only be read in those programs, but since I use each program for different reasons on different devices, it doesn’t really matter.
• Mobipocket is intended for handheld devices, such as Blackberries and Palm Pilots, but I only use it on my laptop. The advantages are that I can make it full screen, and change the size of the font to make it smaller or larger, and make the layout whole page, two or three columns. Primarily, I read books on here when I’m knitting because it’s easy to make the text a readable size and go to the next page without having to put everything down.
• Adobe Digital Editions works with almost everything. As long as I purchase a book in a PDF format (secure or otherwise) I can read it in this program, or load it onto the Sony.
• In ADE, I can make the book almost full screen, but not quite. I can’t change the number of columns displayed, only the number of pages, and I can’t increase or decrease the size of the font, only the amount of magnification. This is slightly annoying because if I want to display two pages on the screen, the type is crazy small, but if I want to be able to read the text, I only get a few paragraphs on the page.
• I really, really want to like the Kobo platform. Really. I tried reading an ebook on it and got more than slightly frustrated with how long it took to “turn” a page – 3 seconds doesn’t sound like a lot, but when it takes less than a fraction of a second in/on other devices, it’s a big wait. Plus, you think maybe you haven’t tapped the corner/side hard enough so you tap it again, and suddenly you’re three pages too far.
• My favourite platform for a non-laptop is Ereader. I can change the size of the font, the colour of the text and background (you can also do this in Kobo), and the orientation on the page. Yes, it’s a tiny screen and it takes getting used to. However, since I always have my iPod with me anyways I don’t have to lug around a separate device.

As for the Sony eReader: while I like that I can have many books on it at one time and can purchase books from a variety of sources (not just the Sony eReader Store), it does have some drawbacks:

• It is a battery hog, and takes forever to charge.
• Maybe it’s just my laptop, but when I plug it in to synch it with the Sony program, my laptop goes a little crazy. “Hey – there are ebooks on here!” it tells me. “Wait… there are also sound files ³ – want me to open iTunes?” it says in a puzzled tone. “Hold on a sec… there are pictures on here! Can I open a photo editing program for you?” By now, it’s got that puffy-eyed look that small children get right before they burst into tears, and I want to hug it and tell it that it’s okay, don’t open anything – just synch with the Sony program – but by now it’s melting down and the whole thing freezes and I have to throw my hands in the air. ⁴
• It also takes forever to turn a page.
• Apparently, you are supposed to be able to take notes with it, but it’s never worked for me.

However! Other positives of the Sony: it has back lights, so if you’re reading in the dark you don’t kill your eyes; there are two card slots so you can add a lot more memory to it; and it has a stylus you can use to tap the screen to turn the page, instead of using the page turn buttons on the bottom of the screen.

AND! In case you thought I had run out of things to talk about (yeah… not happening), my library will soon be offering downloadable ebooks. I don’t have the details because the librarian who’s in charge of it won’t get off her ass and get me the details so I can start downloading them ⁵

Now, to answer the question everyone ⁶ is asking: are paper books dead? Absolutely not! While I’m surrounded by devices great and small, my default book format is paper. I don’t have to worry about it running out of batteries, when I’m done with it I can give it to the library or give it to a friend to read without violating copyright and as much as most of us would like to think that technology is universal, it isn’t. There will always be people who don’t have/can’t afford/don’t have access to computers or devices, and paper books will always be there for them.

If you’ll excuse me, I have two rows of knitting needing to be done and I’m in the middle of a good chapter in my ebook.

Moving forward! A wrap-up, if you will:

1. I have had to give up on the running for now. Around the end of August, I started getting awful pain in my left calf and knee which would leave me in pain for days and make the whole prospect of being active unattractive. My workouts would get shorter and fewer and farther between, which defeats the purpose. It didn’t help that the new treadmills at the gym didn’t have the same “give” that the old ones had [3]. Finally I made the switch to just using the elliptical machine and started using the arc trainer and haven’t had any pain problems since then. Better still, I’ve been able to increase my endurance on both machines. Yay for exercise!

2. You may have noticed that I haven’t done many “what I’ve been reading” -type updates lately [4]. Back in October, I thought about sitting down and doing just that, but couldn’t find the notebook I usually use to keep track of my reading. This did not bode well. Not only have I not made any notes in it since February, I hardly remember what I’ve read between then and now.

Since then I’ve finished two books, The Dragon’s Eye by Stephen King which was tense and slightly creepy and really good, and The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. It was okay, but it cheesed me off slightly – why does it seem like almost all books that are considered critical successes contain copious amounts of personal tragedy? Just once, I’d like to read a book about something happy that does really, really well and isn’t considered chicklit. Grrr… it’s a rant for another day, though.

3. Around August, someone asked if I was considering doing NaNoWriMo again this year. For a while, I really wanted to but wasn’t committed to the idea of starting something I wasn’t sure I would be able to put a good effort into. My blogging has dropped right off the last few months, which makes me sad because I enjoyed having this as a creative outlet. Plus, the more often you write the easier it is to do, and because I wasn’t blogging that often I wasn’t sure I would be able to do the 1770 words EVERY DAY for the month of November. I decided that instead commit to writting a 50,000 word novel, I would start smaller and do a short post every day – way more manageable, right?

Oh no. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had left the story from my 2006 attempt unfinished, and that there was a whole middle part I’d skipped over, and it bugged me that I didn’t really know what happened to get the cast from point A to point 3.14159 [5]. And the more I thought about it, the more I kept thinking up a story. Fast forward two more months and, yep, I reactivated my NaNo account. Today’s word count: 1954. That’s all of today’s words and almost 200 words for tomorrow. Woo!

That’s it for now. I will put an effort into posting more often, even if it’s something silly and trivial, like “today I saw a dead squirrel in the road, and I hope it was the one that ate the ONE TOMATO I got on my tomato plant this summer.”

[1] Bloglines, you have messed up my feeds for the last time! Good riddance!
[2] And since I hadn’t actually opened WP, I didn’t realize I had comments waiting for approval – sorry Sarah and Julie!
[3] Plus, they vibrate when you run and that just exacerbated the whole problem.
[4] Well, I haven’t done much updating period.
[5] This has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the post (but isn’t that the beauty of footnotes?) – my favourite cheer goes something like this:

Cosine, secant
Tangent, sine
3.14159
Gooooooo nerds!