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Monday Miscellany

Monday, December 19th, 2011

How the literary female detective has changed

In The Christian Science Monitor Randy Dotinga says of Scottish mystery writer Denise Mina:

[she] has become one of the finest mystery writers of the 21st century. Her deeply perceptive grasp on the inner lives of crooks, cops, journalists, and their families has allowed her books to transcend the detective genre.

Asked how fictional female detectives have changed over the past 20 years or so, Mina replied:

At first, they had to act like men, carry guns and punch people – be able to beat people up and engage in fisticuffs. In the mid-1990s, their gender is talked about a lot, and they experienced prejudice. Now you’ve reached the point where a woman is just a different type of detective. You’re not getting information just because you’re a woman; it’s not your superpower anymore. It’s just a fact about who you are.

Document: The Symbolism Survey

In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?

McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. Confident, if not downright cocky, he thought the surveys could settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren’t lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery.

What’s remarkable about this survey, writes Sarah Funke Butler, is that 75 authors responded. This was, of course, in the days before email and the internet. McAllister still has the replies from 65, the other 10 having been lost to “a kleptomaniacal friend.”

This article reproduces the original pages of replies by Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, John Updike, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, and Ray Bradbury.

The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress

Starting in 1984, the Center for the Book in the Library began to establish affiliate centers in the 50 states. Today, there is a State Center for the Book in all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. These Center for the Book affiliates carry out the national Center’s mission in their local areas, sponsor programs that highlight their area’s literary heritage and call attention to the importance of books, reading, literacy and libraries. Affiliates must submit an application to become part of — and retain — their Center for the Book status, which is renewable for a three-year period. The Center for the Book has established Guidelines for establishing affiliates and for programming activities. The State Centers gather annually at the Library of Congress for an Idea Exchange Day.

Self-published authors find e-success

USA Today offers yet another testament to the growing popularity of ebooks and to the sea change in the publishing industry that ebooks represent.

Today, authors . . . can bypass traditional publishers. They can digitally format their own manuscript, set a price and sell it to readers through a variety of online retailers and devices. Amazon sells e-books via its Kindle device and on its Kindle app for smartphones and computers. Barnes & Noble sells e-books through its Nook electronic reader device and app. There is also the Sony eReader, Apple’s iPad and Kobo, while Overdrive provides e-books to libraries.

Almost every day brings more digital modes for readers to obtain books in non-print forms, creating more choices for readers, opportunities for self-published writers, and challenges for traditional publishers.

Here are the eye-opening statistics:

According to the Association of American Publishers, e-books grew from 0.6% of the total trade market share in 2008 to 6.4% in 2010, the most recent figures available. Total net revenue for 2010: $878 million with 114 million e-books sold. In adult fiction, e-books are now 13.6% of the market.

Yet, in some cases, the success of ebooks can be a benefit to traditional publishers. Publishers are taking less of a chance if they accept a book that has already proven itself popular through ebook sales.

Posted in Ebooks, Libraries, Literary Criticism, Literary History, Monday Miscellany | No Comments »

Steve Jobs Biography and Other Hot Titles Bookstore Lures

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Steve Jobs Biography and Other Hot Titles Bookstore Lures – NYTimes.com

the initial weeks of Christmas shopping, a boom time for the book business, have yielded surprisingly strong sales for many bookstores, which report that they have been lifted by an unusually vibrant selection; customers who seem undeterred by pricier titles; and new business from people who used to shop at Borders, the chain that went out of business this year.

Despite all the news about the growing popularity of ebooks, readers seem to be returning to traditional books–and traditional bookstores–this holiday season.

“This year so far, it’s been the year of nonfiction,” said Peter Aaron, owner of the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, citing “The Beauty and the Sorrow,” a history of World War I by Peter Englund, and “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, an exploration of thinking and intuition. “What’s extraordinary about the books that are out there is that they’ve been so well written and such a pleasure to read. Maybe people have an appetite for nonfiction right now, just for some sort of grounding in reality.”

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Monday Miscellany

Monday, November 21st, 2011

The fiction of literary friendship

Writing in the Guardian, Wayne Gooderham concludes: “Judging by the stories that have been written about it, writers do not make the best of friends.”

10 Most Reclusive Literary Geniuses in History

The world’s greatest writers use their literary genius to illustrate and comment on the human condition. And yet, those who could be considered to have the best understanding of human feelings often choose to hide themselves away from the public eye. The stereotype of the reclusive author is not always true, but for these literary greats, a life of solitude had more appeal than the draws of fame and awards.

Novelist Fights the Tide by Opening a Bookstore

NASHVILLE — After a beloved local bookstore closed here last December and another store was lost to the Borders bankruptcy, this city once known as the Athens of the South, rich in cultural tradition and home to Vanderbilt University, became nearly barren of bookstores.

A collective panic set in among Nashville’s reading faithful. But they have found a savior in Ann Patchett, the best-selling novelist who grew up here. On Wednesday, Ms. Patchett, the acclaimed author of “Bel Canto” and “Truth and Beauty,” will open Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore that is the product of six months of breakneck planning and a healthy infusion of cash from its owner.

Neal Stephenson, Digital Publishing, and Why Books Will Survive

Hefting Neal Stephenson’s latest 1000+-page tome, Reamde, prompts science and technology writer David DiSalvo to consider the contrast between traditionally published books and books on an ereader. He admits to participating in the ereader culture:

I own a Kindle and like it quite a lot, especially for travel, and I’m sure the latest volley of tablets arriving on the market all have something to offer—but none of these devices can offer the sense of achievement one gets from working through the pages, seeing them amass one after another behind a thumb pressing down against the satisfying weight of quality stock.

But, he adds:

Books are much more than words on a page or screen, though what that “more” is seems to irrationally persist against every notion of progress a digital economy trumpets.

I’m not sure what his notion of that “more” is, but my notion of it is the transactional building of a textual world that occurs when an individual reader interacts with a written text to create the poem, as described by Louise Rosenblatt in The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. In Rosenblatt’s terms, the text is the words the author wrote, while the poem is the imaginal world that the reader builds while interacting with the author’s text. And I don’t see how it makes any difference whether the text is printed on paper or appears on an electronic device. Yes, “Books are much more than words on a page or screen,” but that “more” is created in the reader’s mind, regardless of which form the presentation of the text takes.

DiSalvo continues:

The poet John Ashbery, speaking at the 2011 National Book Awards this week, said “Reading is difficult…[it is] pleasurable and painful…it can change a person.”  And that is precisely why I will keep buying books like Reamde as true to form books and not digital uploads to my Kindle. I want the difficult experience of reading a challenging book to resonate beyond my eyes. I want the entire experience, and I want to feel the sense of accomplishment from embracing the challenge.

All right. But, for my money, he’s begging the question. How does using an ereader prevent him from having “the entire experience” of engaging with the text? What is it about the inherent nature of ink on paper that makes a printed book essentially different from an ebook? Begging the question means assuming that something is true, then asserting that assumption as “proof” of the fact in question, and that is exactly what DiSalvo does here.

He also writes:

If we attempt to relegate reading entirely to a one-dimensional form, no matter how stylized or convenient, I think we are mystified by an illusion of progress masking regress. Maybe the loss from doing so can’t be quantified, but it’s real nonetheless, in the same way that watching the world through a TV screen instead of imbibing it through experience is a profound negation of what it means to be human.  There will never be a digital prosthetic capable of replacing what’s lost when we trade fullness for immediacy.

A “one-dimensional form”? An ereader is just as three-dimensional as a printed book; it’s just that one of those dimensions, thickness, is a lot smaller than the book’s, particularly in the case of Reamde. And his comparison of reading to “watching the world through a TV screen instead of imbibing it through experience” is simply not apt in this context. There IS a real world outside, and watching it on TV is not the same as experiencing it. But the world produced by reading a book–the poem, in Rosenblatt’s terms–does not have an objective existence; it only comes into existence when a reader creates it by interacting with a text. So this argument, too, begs the question.

In the end, the entire ebook vs. printed book argument comes down to personal preference. Some people will prefer one over the other all the time; other people may prefer one over the other depending on circumstances (an ereader is much easier to lug on vacation than a stack of books, after all). And it’s certainly all right to express one’s personal preference. Just admit that that’s what it is.

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Monday Miscellany

Monday, November 14th, 2011

Publishing Words: The Future of Books

Writing in The Harvard Crimson, Sofie C. Brooks discusses how the rise of ebooks may change the publishing industry:

What the publishing industry faces right now is a customer base that demands a digital product even as the technology that makes these products possible is still in its early stages of development. Random House has experienced a 200 percent growth in eBook sales this year, and every other company’s sales tell similar tales.

Brooks suggests some ways that authors, publishers, and distributors could work together in the changing world of literary publication.

While there are still those who continue to cling to the beauty of the traditionally printed word, literature is not dependent on its physical form. Unlike an opera or ballet, the words of Dickens, Chaucer, and Shakespeare still ring true even on an electronic screen. The essence of the art is inextinguishable, and the rest may turn out to be just details.

The Talking Cure at Work in Contemporary YA Fiction

We keep hearing that modern society has come to rely on drugs rather than psychotherapy for dealing with mental health issues. But, Kabi Hartman assures us:

Nevertheless, fictional teenagers are still talking to therapists for pages on end. Having now read a growing pile of novels, I can vouch for the fact that teen protagonists are actually having insights and getting better. In fact, the majority of these novels depict psychotherapy as transformative.

Hartman likens the several novels she discusses here to the tradition of religious conversion narratives (think John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress). And she finds hope in the picture that these novels offer, that adolescents can achieve self-knowledge through therapy:

these novels, however rife with soap operatic bad luck and sentimentality, champion the idea that self knowledge emerges in dialogue with a trusted other. Although most of them grind out cookie cutter conversion stories, I cannot be hard on these works. Ultimately, they suggest that engaging with someone else, face to face, is transforming — or, at the very least, provides more scope for plot and character development than popping a pill.

Are Rereadings Better Readings?

Writing in the New Yorker blog “The Book Bench,” Nathaniel Stein looks at the value of rereading books. He refers to “’On Rereading,’ Patricia Meyer Spacks’s charming and strange blend of memoir, literary criticism, and scientific treatise.” After retiring from teaching, Spacks undertook a period of rereading many of the literary milestones of her life.

Spacks’s constant fixation is the paradox of the simultaneous “sameness” and “difference” of rereading—how it is that the words are exactly the same but our perceptions of them so different?

Stein himself is more interested in the question “are rereadings better readings?”

What rereading tells us about ourselves, and how we have evolved intellectually, is as important as what it tells us about the books, Spacks believes. She’s endlessly interested in “how our minds, hearts, experience, personal and cultural situation, or all of the above … have changed since the last time we read those words.”

Stein further writes that Spacks believes rereadings “can reveal unwelcome truths about our past selves, and cause disenchantment—in the most literal sense—with the books we used to love.”

I haven’t read Patricia Spacks’s book, although I have now added it to my ever-growing list of TBR (to be read) books. But Spacks seems to subscribe to the reader-response theory of literature, which posits that readers bring to bear all their past experiences and learning when they read a book. In this respect, then, a rereading of a book could very well differ from the first reading because the reader is now a different person. When we reread a book we originally loved and find out that we now love it less, that realization may say more about us than about the book. I suspect this is what Stein says Spacks means by recognizing “unwelcome truths about our past selves.”

However, the experience may also work in a more positive direction. Whenever I find myself feeling down on humanity, I reread To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Immersing myself in the story of Atticus, Scout, and Jem Finch always reminds me that there are many good and decent people in the world.

How about you? Are there any books that you have enjoyed rereading?

10 Famous Literary Characters and Their Real-Life Inspirations

Here’s an intriguing list. And–surprise!–not all the literary characters are human.

Posted in Ebooks, Literary Criticism, Monday Miscellany, Publishing, Reading, Writing | No Comments »

Amazon Unveils Its Tablet, The Kindle Fire: Can It Compete? : Monkey See : NPR

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Amazon Unveils Its Tablet, The Kindle Fire: Can It Compete? : Monkey See : NPR

NPR offers an extensive review of Amazon’s new Kindle offerings, including a direct comparison between the Kindle Fire and Apple’s iPad:

A supercharged Kindle or an underpowered iPad? For the Fire to catch on, Amazon probably needs it to be compared in terms of functionality to the existing Kindle, and not to the far more expensive iPad. The Fire can’t stand toe-to-toe with the iPad for functionality, cool design, or size, but Amazon hopes to compensate with the much lower price. By selling the Fire for $199 (when rumors had suggested more like $250), they have a chance to position it as a tablet for people who haven’t felt like an iPad was essential enough to spend more than $500 to acquire.

In fact, NPR’s Laura Sydell told me she’s been speaking to analysts today who believe the price point can bring people into the tablet market who would never enter it at current Apple prices. One pointed out to her that a person could by a Kindle Fire for herself and an inexpensive Kindle for her kid and still get out of the deal for $300 — $200 less than an iPad.

What the Fire probably compares to most directly is Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color, which also runs on Android

 

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Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet, Three New Kindle Models Starting at $79

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

Amazon Unveils $199 Kindle Fire Tablet, Three New Kindle Models Starting at $79

At a packed press event in New York this morning, Amazon unveiled its long-expected tablet offering, called the Kindle Fire. The company also debuted three new Kindle devices, with the least expensive priced at $79.

Through a link in this short article, you can keep up with Publishers Weekly‘s live blog updating Amazon’s big announcement.

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Monday Miscellany

Monday, September 26th, 2011

2012 Stamp Preview: A Stamp a Day

The United States Postal Service will be issuing some new literature-related stamps in 2012. Click on the numbers to see more information about these:

  • #2 Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • #11 O. Henry
  • #31 Twentieth-Century Poets: Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, E. E. Cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams

One in Six Americans Now Use e-Reader with One in Six Likely to Purchase in Next Six Months

Yet more evidence of the rapidly growing popularity of e-readers. This release announces the results of a Harris Poll of 2,183 adults surveyed online between July 11 and 18, 2011:

While some may lament the introduction of the e-Reader as a death knell for books, the opposite is probably true. First, those who have e-Readers do, in fact, read more. Overall, 16% of Americans read between 11 and 20 books a year with one in five reading 21 or more books in a year (20%). But, among those who have an e-Reader, one-third read 11-20 books a year (32%) and over one-quarter read 21 or more books in an average year (27%).

Overall, e-readers do not seem to be contributing to the downfall of reading, but they are a fact that publishers will have to adapt to in order to survive.

9 Things That Happen When You Read

Susan K. Perry, Ph. D., writes about creativity in her “Creating in Flow” blog for Psychology Today. In this entry she discusses The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Here is her own paraphrased and adapted list, based on Pamuk’s book, of 9 things that happen when we read:

1. We observe the general scene and follow the narrative. Whether action-filled or more literary, we read all novels, Pamuk says, the same way: seeking out the meaning and main idea.

2. We transform words into images in our mind, completing the novel as our imaginations picture what the words are telling us.

3. Part of our mind wonders how much is real experience and how much is imagination. “A third dimension of reality slowly begins to emerge within us: the dimension of the complex world of the novel.”

4. We wonder if the novel depicts reality as we know it. Is this scene realistic, could this actually happen?

5. We enjoy the precision of analogies, the power of narrative, the way sentences build upon one another, the music of the prose.

6. We make moral judgments about the characters’ behavior, and about the novelist for his own moral judgments by way of the characters’ actions and their consequences.

7. We feel successful when we understand the text, and we come to feel as though it was written just for us.

8. Our memory works hard to keep track of all the details, and in a well-constructed novel, everything connects to everything.

9. We search for the secret center of the novel, convinced that there is one. We hunt for it like a hunter searches for meaningful signs in the forest.

Describing what happens when we read is difficult because, once we begin to think about what’s happening, whatever it is stops happening. However, these 9 points seem to describe what I later remember as going on during a period of intense, prolonged reading.

How about you?

Prize-Winning Female Authors Respond To Questions About Gender Gap

Merritt Tierce and Apricot Irving, two winners of the Rona Jaffee awards given to female writers who display both promise and excellence early in their careers, answer questions about how women writers fare in relation to their male counterparts.

5 Free College-Level Writing & Lit Videos

Recommendations of five videos relating to writing, reading, and publishing from YouTube’s education channel. Here’s your chance to learn for free from masters such as Ray Bradbury, Clive Cussler, Maxine Hong Kingston, Penelope Lively, and David McCullough.

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Monday Miscellany

Monday, September 19th, 2011

Ikea is changing its long-lived Billy bookshelf. Is print dead?

Ikea will make changes to its low-cost, high-volume Billy bookshelf this fall. And to some, that means books are dying.

Ten Crime Books You Have to Read Before You Die

This title is way misleading, since there are two lists of 10 plus numerous alternates. And there’s also some basic information about best-selling crime novelists John Connolly and Declan Hughes.

National SAT reading scores fall to record low

SAT reading scores for the high school class of 2011 were the lowest on record, and combined reading and math scores fell to their lowest point since 1995.

Writers on writing

The Washington Post asked a few writers to complete the following sentences:

  • THE THING I’M HAPPIEST ABOUT IN MY WRITING CAREER IS . . .
  • I WOULD LIKE READERS TO REACT TO MY WORK BY . . .
  • WRITING IS A SPIRITUAL ACTIVITY BECAUSE . . .
  • THE BOOK THAT HAS HAD THE GREATEST INFLUENCE ON ME IS . . .
  • THE BEST SENTENCE I’VE EVER READ IS . . .
  • THE COOLEST THING I’VE EVER DONE AS A RESULT OF MY WRITING IS . . .

Read answers by writers including Russell Banks, Jim Lehrer, Gregory Maguire, Jennifer Egan, Sara Paretsky, and Terry McMillan.

Novelist ditches publisher at book launch for ‘condescending’ treatment 

Novelist Polly Courtney has dropped her publisher HarperCollins for giving her books “condescending and fluffy” covers aimed at the chick lit market.

At the launch of It’s a Man’s World, her third novel published by HarperCollins, Courtney announced that she will be returning to the world of self-publishing.

Five free crime fiction classics – the best!

The Crime Fiction Lover site is making it easy for readers to download free ebook versions of “five of our favourite classic detective fiction reads that are often overlooked but are freely available.” Offerings are these five “gems hidden in the rough”:

  • The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
  • The Murders in Rue Morgue – Edgar Allen Poe
  • The Great Impersonation – E Phillips Oppenheim
  • The Secret Adversary – Agatha Christie
  • The Red House Mystery - AA Milne

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Monday Miscellany

Monday, September 12th, 2011

Sick Of Young Adult Lit? 3 Books For The Whiz Kid

In this issue of NPR’s “three books” series, Adam Mansbach reflects on which books he read in childhood have stuck with him:

The ones I continue to love now, a quarter-century after first mauling their spines, tend to confront complex social issues bravely, convey emotions with tremendous, empathetic clarity, and rest on compelling narrative voices. In other words — the very elements that draw me into novels today.

Read his homage to these three works:

  • The Moves Make the Man by Bruce Brooks
  • Father’s Arcane Daughter by E. L. Konigsburg
  • The Flight of the Cassowary by John Levert

What’s In Store: 3 Tales Of A Terrifying Future

In this next issue of NPR’s “three books” series, Drew Magary muses on fictional presentations of the apocalypse.

I think there’s probably a point to which civilization will evolve, and then all the gas and water will run out and we’ll spend the rest of eternity trying to get back to the awesome times when we had, you know, food to eat. I really hope I’m not alive when that turning point arrives, because it will be bad.

See what he has to say about these books:

  • World War Z by Max Brooks
  • I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
  • Robocop by Ed Naha

E-books’ popularity is rewriting the sales story

“It’s been a watershed year for e-books,” says Tina Jordan of the Association of American Publishers. “Any publisher will tell you that a best-selling title from a branded author can run upwards of 30% to 40% in digital sales.”

Despite surges in new technology and strong e-reader and e-book sales, print books are holding their own; publishers see them as key for the future. They want consumers to have many choices in reading formats and ease of buying.

According to this article, publishers will continue to invest in new titles.  And the publishing industry is waiting to see how digital and print sales play out in the upcoming holiday season.

The 5 Worst Workers in Literature

I’m a little late with this one, but it’s not my fault–really. This post, in honor of Labor Day here in the United States, didn’t appear on the PW blog until the day after Labor Day.

Anyway, here’s a look at the five worst workers in literature:

1. Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

2. Tom Mota from Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

3. Jim Dixon from Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

4. Henry Chinaski from Post Office by Charles Bukowski

5. Bartleby from Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville

All-TIME 100 Best Nonfiction Books

Time magazine has chosen “the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME … magazine” in the following categories:

  • autobiography/memoir
  • biography
  • business
  • culture
  • essays
  • food writing
  • health
  • history
  • ideas
  • nonfiction novels
  • politics
  • science
  • self-help/instructional
  • social history
  • sports
  • war

10 Can’t-Miss Nonfiction Books For Fall

Kirkus Reviews recommends books to curl up with by the fireplace this fall. There should be at least one here to appeal to just about everyone.

The Article Everyone Who Loves Books Should Read

Keith Gessen’s new Vanity Fair e-book, How a Book Is Born: The Making of “The Art of Fielding” (available for Kindle and Nook), is a thorough and riveting study of books and their business, and anyone with an interest in writing should do themselves a great favor by buying it right now. It’s $1.99 well spent.

Gabe Habash, who wrote this post, also says:

At 17,000 words, Gessen’s article is long-form journalism done right (something e-books are really starting to figure out)–it’s long enough to bury you in its story but also short enough (and told briskly enough) to fight off any inclinations toward boredom. It’s overall message: content is king. For all of the brisk narration Gessen engages in, and for all the uncertainty creeping into the publishing conversation, it still comes down to the fact that people want to read good books. And Gessen’s piece is a really good article about a good book.

 

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Monday Miscellany

Monday, August 22nd, 2011

Great Authors To Follow On Twitter

These eight writers are sometimes hysterical, sometimes insightful, and are sure to give you words for thought in 140 characters or less.

Of interest to both readers and writers.

Overrated

Authors, critics, and editors on “great books” that aren’t all that great.

Some of these may surprise you. Or perhaps they’re also the books that you secretly love to hate.

Back-To-School Reads: 13 Big Books To Read While The Leaves Fall

Beach-reading season is just about over. NPR checks in with a lucky 13 suggestions of books to curl up with this fall.

Discworld’s Terry Pratchett On Death And Deciding

If you’ve read the Discworld novels by popular fantasy writer Terry Pratchett, you’ve surely encountered Death. He’s an actual character — a skeleton in a black hood who’s portrayed as not such a bad guy after all.

So maybe it’s not so surprising that at 63, Pratchett — who has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s — speaks openly about causing his own death.

NPR discusses assisted suicide with author Terry Pratchett.

Deciding on a Book, and How to Read It 

Recently several people who know I have a Kindle have asked me whether they should buy one. I love my Kindle, but it may not be the correct choice for everyone. So if anyone else asks me in the future, I’m going to point them to this article in the New York Times, in which Nick Bilton compares several reading options:

I set out to try them all, reading a chapter on each: the Amazon Kindle, the first- and second-generation Apple iPads, the Barnes & Noble Nook, an iPhone, a Windows Phone, a Google Android phone, a Google Android tablet and a laptop computer. To be fair, I also read a chapter in that old-fashioned form — a crumply old print paperback.

 

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