It’s been a-buzz in the air for a few weeks (months?) – Barnes and Noble’s answer to the Kindle.  I’ve been ignoring the chatter for the most part because, being unemployed at this point makes it impossible for me to grab hold of new techie toys and play with them the way I normally would have wanted to do. However, the Nook (as it is now known) is set to be released in November, on trial at a B&N near you, and as enticing as a well-built man in bikini trunks. Ok, ok – maybe not THAT enticing.

As you all may already know, I am a Kindle owner. My Kindle sleeps beside me at nights – hubby on one side of the bed, Kindle on the bedside table on other side. It goes pretty much everywhere with me. I have over 500 books on it and every now and then, I will set aside everything else that is happening and go read a book. For instance, last night, I think I finally shut the light off at near 3am because I was up reading One for the Money (Stephanie Plum, No. 1) by Janet Evanovich. As I may have mentioned before, I was always a paper and binding kind of bookworm – I had to feel and smell the books to get the full reading experience. Reading isn’t only about reading the words and understanding for me, it’s the entire experience of reading that gets me. If I didn’t have trouble controlling my spending urges, I would spend far more time in Barnes and Noble book stores than I currently do – simply because the smell of the place, the quiet, the sight of people just reading right where they are – seated on the store floor – is just part and parcel of the reading experience.

I shall never forget the Dallas experience: 3 colleagues and myself were in Dallas on a training exercise for 3 weeks in December of 2006. One Saturday, they wanted to go to the mall and shop. I am not one for shopping; when I need stuff, I go shopping, get what I need and leave. This kind of shopping has always tired and bored me. Luckily, the mall where they chose to go had a Barnes & Noble – right at the door where we parked. So I happily told them I’d wait while they shopped in B&N. Of course, they were stymied – what was I going to do when I was done in B&N because they weren’t likely to be done in the next few minutes. I smiled and told them that if it took them 3 hours, they’d come back and find me seated right here on the floor in almost the same position they left me in. They laughed, left the car keys with me because they were sure I would want to go sit in the car, and said they’d check on me in an hour or 2.

Long story short, 3 hours later, they all were done and came to find me … and there I was, seated on the floor in front of the same shelf they left me in front of, with a pile of books around me – reading. This is the kind of reader I am. The smell of the store, the sound of pages turning, silence of people reading all around me …. that was my heaven.

The Kindle managed to merge 2 of my loves – technology and reading. I don’t get the whole experience with the kindle, but I get enough that I could literally give up my book addiction. And for some reason, I stopped going to B&N. It’s because, I think, that I associated being in the store with leaving with a bag full of books. I felt odd to walk into a B&N with a Kindle, sit and read it and then walk out.

So, the Nook opens up endless possibilities for me – and I have a date with my neared B&N to go and check out the Nook and dream. Of all the features of the Nook, the 2 that struck me most stunningly is the ability to lend books to friends AND it’s WiFi capabilities.  Oh yes, this could be the start of a great thing for B&N.

I’m sorry Kindle … sometimes it’s not so good to be first.

And I promise you, dear readers, as soon as I am done with my date with a Nook, I shall impart my impressions right here for you.

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My best friend gifted me a Kindle 1 just before the Kindle 2 was released in early 2009 and I have to say that next to the extended Lord of The Rings DVD set, that just might be the best gift a friend has ever given me. That my Kindle is now the 2nd most important piece of technology I own is a revolution of sorts since I traditionally have been a “real book” reader before now. I have tried reading electronic versions of books on my computer, my cellphone and on both of the PDAs that I once had and not one of those mediums were a satisfactory substitute for my love of the FEEL of books. Enter the Kindle – and it was enough for me to literally get rid of most of my “real books” and get electronic versions of most of them.

I have been a big reader from the age of 6 when one afternoon, after bugging my mother once too often, she pointed towards one of the very laden bookshelves my parents own and told me to find something to read. Being that Shakespeare, Michael Manley and the like were beyond my 6 year old mind, I found and fixed on a book by Carolyn Keene; The Quest of the Missing Map – a Nancy Drew Mystery. My mother likes to finish this story with the sentence “I haven’t heard a peep out of her since” which isn’t far from the truth – after that day, the first place to look for me would be on my bed with my nose buried in some book or other. I still hear echoes of my father’s voice yelling at me to not lie down and read “It’ll spoil your eyes!”

Soon as I could write legibly, I realized that I liked to write also. I had books upon books of my writing. Most were stream of conscious dumps or just plain idle writings with little or no imagination or construct about it … but I dreamed of writing novels like Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew mysteries and later on when I discovered Stephen King, horror stories to curl the toes of the most brave of souls. I will even admit to starting stories that friends have told me have promise, yet never have I managed to complete one. The process usually is: I start writing, hit a block, re-read what I’ve written and find it wanting, finally abandon the whole idea.

Lately, I have been craving the opportunity to use my love of reading and writing and make a career out of them. And when I say career, I don’t mean a media mogul with offices in 10 cities around the world. No, I mean a job I love that I can probably work a schedule of my own around, earn some cash and expand my experience and skills while I am at it. Which in itself is odd, considering that my training and work experience up until now has been in Information Technology. I choose to see that as a plus, however. Knowing as much as I do about computers – what they can do, how they can break – I am sure I will be able to bypass that usual hurdle and hit the ground running writing and reading.

Enter my best friend and her suggestion that I re-read Stephen King’s “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”. After only a chapter or 2, I realize that to be successful at writing, I must practice and put myself out there to be seen. Forget how bad I think it is, pat myself on the back when I complete something, put it out there for others to see, allow them to criticize (constructively as well as destructively), take the advice at face value and re-assess my work and get back in the ring and try again.

As with almost everything in life, it is a work in progress.

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And thus it ends….

Spent my first day as one of the no-longer-employed spending money … wouldn’t you know it? We got tubs to pack away stuff for the move that I don’t quite trust the movers to deal with – things such as the clothes we won’t be needing until we get a house, linen, bathroom stuff …. well, you get the idea. Come Monday, after I read my first couple of pages out of “You can heal your life” for the reading assignment my sis and I have. We’re going to be reading that together, making notes, comparing notes.

Then I start packing … which isn’t as hectic an undertaking as it sounds…. I am told the movers will take care the bulk of that I just need to secure (1) the stuff we will need for the trip and the days just after we arrive and (2) the stuff we’ll want for our mini-vacation to Michigan (which kinda works out to be a subset of the same stuff from (1) anyway).  For the most part, the biggest work is figuring out how to travel with a feral cat and a needy cat on a near 5 day journey with 2-3 stops along the way and making sure all our subscriptions are cancelled or put on hold, mail forwarded … stuff like that.

But today was also used for leisure – absolute and complete leisure. Even though hubby has been on vacation now for a week, today was the first Saturday we’ve spent together in about …. oh, 3 months?  So that was good too.

Despite being a little despondent about the whole leaving process, I have to admit that there ARE pluses to this whole business of moving … it’s an adventure, a new experience, something to blog about.

And on that note, I am heading to bed in the ever present attempt to re-align my sleep and waking patterns.

YUSH

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You ever delete unread messages in your inbox (subscriptions to some news service or something) and say to yourself “knowing my luck, those will be the editions that actually HAVE something I’d be interested in reading tonight?”

I’ve discovered this wonderful new web service aptly called “FeedMyInbox” which will take any web feed and send it to your inbox daily (sometimes more than once a day depending on the feed). I was getting WAY behind my news subscriptions in Google Reader and no method of keeping was working for me at ALL. I put a reader on my phone, it’s still there telling me I have the same 742 unread items that I had when I first installed it. So I trimmed my reading list thinking that if I had less to read I’d be more inclined to keep up. Well, that’s all fine and dandy when you have time outside your other interests to go TO Reader and read. So I thought it’d be nice to have some key feeds delivered in my email since I (a) read email on my phone quite a bit and (b) always check my email at some point anyway. If I don’t have time to do anything else, I make time to check mail because that’s one of the key methods for me to keep in touch with people.

Well, for the last 3 or 4 days, my feeds (except for the personal blogs) have been B-O-R-I-N-G. I haven’t had any REALLY interesting articles for at least a couple of days. Tonight when I saw the 3 messages sitting in my inbox, being that I am so tired and needed to blog anyway … I deleted them.

/sigh

Of course, you KNOW that one of those will have THE article of the WEEK that I SHOULD have read. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to dream them up myself in sleep tonight.

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This morning, on FB, I noticed a friend posting a note voicing very loudly a complete and utter disgust with Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series. Stop, stop – before you Twilight lovers get your panties in a bunch, here’s the thing:  Meyer has portrayed Bella and her peers in a light that is MOST unhealthy for modern teens. And THIS is the point being made. It is sickening to think that Bella could be a role-model for nowadays teens. I never considered this before because frankly, I despise Bella. I think she is a weak and snivelling ditz. BUT … I am very familiar with the concept of a protagonist in a story being THE most hated of all in the entire story. It pains me to admit this, but I canNOT recall at this moment where this concept was born in my head. I studied literature at A-level and have had the benefit of MANY classical literature…..

ARGH!!!! I’ve remembered. =)  Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales – specifically The Pardoner’s Tale. I had to read that for A-level literature. That man, the pardoner, was the most insipid, cold-hearted and CRUEL character I had come across. He was ruthless, yet cunning and in some ways amusing. We learned to despise him, yet appreciate him and his point of view and in the end learning to love his hateful ways.

I admit, it is a complex concept but it is the lesson learned that helped me appreciate Bella and Jacob in this light. It was their rant that brought my attention to the fact that whileI had the benefit of such a lesson, there are others who have not. A LOT of others. A great number of them young teens without the concept that a main character is not necessarily the nicest character. I have to say that I think Ms. Meyer dropped the ball here. There are too many impressionable minds out there willing to grab at Bella as a role model. And Bella is the worst example of how one should conduct oneself as a young woman in today’s world. There are a few other incidents in the story that create a moral outrage as well, but I can’t mention them without giving away the story. Suffice it to say that this story is not about how life should ideally be at all – it’s not a blueprint, it’s not a guide, it’s not a fairytale .. it is a fantasy which is dark and brooding and not necessarily positive.

For those of us with a solid moral view of what is “right” and “wrong”, the Twilight series is a wonderful read especially if one can accept the fact that the main character is not necessarily the one you are supposed to like … for the rest of us .. well, let us hope that the voice of the former group creates perspective for the latter.

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