Nothing I read in March really enthused me. The Help by Kathryn Stockett is quite good, and doesn't deserve the complications of the hype that has grown up around it. Debra Hamel's Mutilation of the Herms is a specialist book for a non-specialist reader -- it's nice to be treated as intelligent. And Maria McCann's The Wilding is worth reading too. I can't think of anyone else who writes historical fiction in which the different attitudes of the past are so well conveyed.
I've been reading a lot on kindle because it's easy to take on the tube or bus, and I've got quite a few unread things on it because of the Kindle Daily Deal and the occasional sales they have. At the moment the truth about ebooks is that I want everything in both formats. I yearn for some shelves I can put books on and just know they're there. It would be really luxurious to have all my favourite books physically present somewhere accessible. I also want them on my kindle so that if I suddenly want to look something up I can do that too.
If you do have a Kindle I would strongly recommend using Calibre to set things up so you're less likely to lose what you've bought through some spasm on Amazon's part. Enough of us trusting them, let's force them to trust us for a change.
Wednesday 4 April 2012
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Thanks for mentioning my book! I like what you say about being treated as intelligent.
ReplyDeleteI liked the emphasis on the sources and what the sources did and could tell us, and what they didn't and couldn't. I think it could be a good thing for young people to read for its method as much as for learning about that particular set of events.
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