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The basic trade of fiction is “I will entertain you with an interesting narrative in exchange for your time” almost never works out as reality is consistently more interesting than what the best authors can produce.  Writers can easily brood on what has happened but almost never on what will so the skilled author will almost always lose in my mind to the skilled biographer or historian.  Because of this view, I felt like I was almost indulging myself by reading The Poisoner’s Handbook after finishing A Clash of Kings, part of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy books.  The latter had characters, the former had people, the latter had a narrative, the former had events embedded in actual history; it was so decadent that I finished The Poisoner’s Handbook in a day.  I can visit the tombs of Charles Norris, former chief medical examiner for New York City, and famed toxicologist Alexander Gettler, I have no such opportunity with Eddard Stark.

Yet, I am a completist and will consume the remaining 3000 pages of text penned by Martin across six Audible.com credits, but when one’s looking, I’m going to learn about the history of Biblical translation, read Tina Fey’s biography, and see why Lee Smolin thinks string theory is horse hockey.

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For reasons I don’t fully understand the Kindle has re…. kindled my interest in fiction.  Ever since finishing The Illiad I’ve been unimpressed with fiction’s ability to keep its basic promise of telling a compelling story that reveals a part of reality that’s otherwise unknown, unexplored, or at least entertaining as these “revelations” are usually pedestrian or impossible.  But, I maintain an interest in being a generically well-read person despite inevitably turning back to what I consider the vastly more compelling world of fact and discovery that has a roughly 1-to-1 correspondence with reality.

The Kindle upturns this, maybe by reversing my fear of someone discovering my counteridiomatic reading or having to lug around a book that by definition contains something that never happened.  So, I started reading the collected stories of HP Lovecraft and was suckered into paying the extra dollar to get 102 stories instead of the more common collection of about 70.  I started reading the collection and immediately realized why the standard corpus includes 30 fewer stories; because those 30 stories suck.  Every page was supposed to contain tales of the macabre involving beings from beyond the uncaring universe in which we drift.  I’ve read about 10 so far and each one of them absolutely blew.  I’m tempted to do something I never do except with music and “just read the good ones”.

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After instructing my morning sessions I gunned home, for today was Kindle Day, and come hell or high water I would be there to receive my e-reader.  Around 3 PM I really had to use the bathroom but I was not going to waste this opportunity to break in my Kindle and patiently waited until the device was delivered at 4:30 PM before darting to the can after activating it.

The device is amazingly readable and there’s a magic to watching the words drip away to be replaced with another set on something that looks so much like paper with a reflectivity between a glossy magazine and standard library print.  The search function and dictionary functions work very well and allowed for meta moments where I used the automatic dictionary within the American Heritage Dictionary to define ‘potentate’ within ‘plenipotentiary’.  The browser functionality is almost comical in how it renders color-rich pages in gray scale and completely lacks javascript support knocking out 60% of web functionality.  The upside is that the browser requires only a trickle of bandwidth as anything that would consume bits is largely stripped out and is free.  With a little planning, I think this is a feature that could be well used.

The first book I read was Rework which was mediocre.  I’ll need something to wash its taste out of my mouth.

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I received a stay of execution and my contract may now end in March instead of December.  To celebrate, I brought “The Codebreakers” into work as my new bathroom reading and things haven’t quite worked out.  I simply can take a book that big into the work bathroom.  I stand up, grab it and immediately am mocked by my own brain.   As I walk towards the door with five pounds of book I start losing strength in my legs and my hand shakes as it goes for the knob.  I simply can’t into the work bathroom with that much… book.  Frailty, thy name is textbooks-on-cryptology.

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I hate the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic e-book reader.  I really have no qualm with the device I suppose but the model of licensing reading material and calling it a “book reader” smacks of consumer injustice.  But for health reasons I may need to get one.

I read on the can as most people of learning do.  I finished Robert R. Colton and Joel A. Palmer’s History of the Modern World largely on the toilet and some 3k of the 4.7k pages of the Dark Tower heptilogy were consumed on the crapper.  This habit has had long-term health effects though as I’m now reading the 1.3 kilopage tome The Codebreakers and my right wrist starts hurting after a few minutes.  This has never happened before and I fear it may endanger my ability to read books larger than a few hundred pages.

So I’m reduced to three options:
1) Buy an e-book reader
2) Eschew large text consumption on the john
3) Construct some ridiculous articulated lapboard to mount in the bathrooms of my house.

The answer is obvious; I have a battery of counterbalance potty tables to build.

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I’m brushing up on my cryptography and took the recommendations of the Security Now! podcast and looked up The Code Book and Codebreakers.  The latter I had to get on library loan the former was available in my local branch, but in Juvenile Non-Fiction.  I’m trying to figure out how stupid I’m going to look picking out two other cryptography books from the “big kids” section followed by this one from Juvenile Non-Fiction.  It’ll be impossible to pass it off like it’s for someone else unless I try to pull “oh, my kid and I are going through a cryptography phase” thing.  This may not work as the checkout person is a dropout with which I went to high school who has her own brood of failure and probably knows both what juvenile fiction looks like and that me having a kid is a level of stupid beyond farcical.

I could go to a different branch where I probably wouldn’t arouse suspicion or if I did, my visit would be left in the dustbin of history.  I’ll have to think about this one.

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I found the following in an Economist.com article on why kids can’t read:

No question, without a wimpy GUI, computers would never have become as popular as they are today. The command-line interface—with its forbidding prompt and blinking cursor—required mastering a whole catechism of arcane instructions that only a priesthood of computerdom could cherish.

When “root@computername:~# shutdown -h now” could be replaced by a simple click of a mouse to switch off a computer, novices of all ages and backgrounds could climb aboard the digital bandwagon.

via Economist.com 

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I found the following in an Economist.com article on why kids can’t read:

No question, without a wimpy GUI, computers would never have become as popular as they are today. The command-line interface—with its forbidding prompt and blinking cursor—required mastering a whole catechism of arcane instructions that only a priesthood of computerdom could cherish.

When “root@computername:~# shutdown -h now” could be replaced by a simple click of a mouse to switch off a computer, novices of all ages and backgrounds could climb aboard the digital bandwagon.

via Economist.comÂ