{"id":13161,"date":"2010-07-14T01:18:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-14T08:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2010\/07\/14\/13161.html"},"modified":"2010-07-14T01:18:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-14T08:18:00","slug":"recent-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2010\/07\/14\/recent-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent reading"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Speaking of reading (as I was at the end of my previous entry), I've been getting back to doing more pleasure-reading lately.<\/p>\n<p>After finishing the <cite>Secret Country<\/cite> trilogy last week, I went back to the <cite>Don Quixote<\/cite> ebook briefly, but hadn't even finished the translator's lengthy introduction before the Powell's order arrived.<\/p>\n<p>In the past three days, I've read most of <cite>Seaward<\/cite> (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 <cite>Paksenarrion<\/cite>, especially since someone pointed out that the first volume (<cite>Sheepfarmer's Daughter<\/cite>) is available as a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.webscription.net\/p-587-sheepfarmers-daughter.aspx\">free ebook download<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>It looks like <cite>Sheepfarmer's Daughter<\/cite> 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.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, yeah, and I read the first three chapters of <cite>The Eyre Affair<\/cite> (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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaking of reading (as I was at the end of my previous entry), I&#8217;ve been getting back to doing more&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}