Recent reading
Speaking of reading (as I was at the end of my previous entry), I've been getting back to doing more pleasure-reading lately.
After finishing the Secret Country trilogy last week, I went back to the Don Quixote ebook briefly, but hadn't even finished the translator's lengthy introduction before the Powell's order arrived.
In the past three days, I've read most of Seaward (sadly, am not enjoying it as much as everyone else seems to; I think I might've liked it more if I'd encountered it as a kid) and have made a fair bit of progress on Paksenarrion, especially since someone pointed out that the first volume (Sheepfarmer's Daughter) is available as a free ebook download.
I don't love Stanza as an ebook reader, but it does have a mode where you can turn off all the page chrome, which lets you display way more words per page than iBooks can. I also like that I can set the line spacing, paragraph spacing, and paragraph indentation in Stanza.
It looks like Sheepfarmer's Daughter is also available in a variety of other ebook formats, but I haven't looked at those. Anyway, I'm about halfway through reading the first volume; after that, I may switch to the thousand-page printed trade paperback omnibus edition I just got (to read volumes 2 and 3), or I may buy the ebook version of the three-in-one omnibus. Or both.
Oh, yeah, and I read the first three chapters of The Eyre Affair (which is to say, the free sample chapters in one ebook reader or another). I had been expecting it to be a sort of wacky screwball comedy; was surprised and confused to find that it reads (to me) like a serious, or at least straight-faced, alternate history, with the only significant humor I saw being the punny character names. After some discussion on a mailing list, I'm uncertain whether I'll continue reading it or not; I'm kind of interested in the plot, and quite intrigued by what I've heard about a significant speculative aspect, but suspecting that if I'm not finding it funny, I won't enjoy it nearly as much as some folks do.
Anyway. Still not reading as much as most of my friends do, but have picked up the pace a bit from the first few months of this year; was finishing about one book a month, and now it's more like one every couple of weeks. Apparently being able to read nicely formatted ebooks from the very nice iPhone 4 screen (which I pretty much always have with me) is making a big difference in my reading habits lately.