The Night Watch and the Kindle
Jan. 10th, 2010 11:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mangosteenA few weeks ago, I acquired an Amazon Kindle
, which is to say "a fairly spiffy eBook reader with a bookstore attached." The most immediate effect of this is that I'm reading a lot more. I'm willing to chalk a small amount of that up to "oooo shiny new toy" but that's not the whole of it.
Working Hypothesis: The Kindle lowers my resistance to sitting down and reading.
Put another way, I read at a slower pace than most of my peers. The end result is that I feel like I have to set aside a significant block of time before I can sit down with a book and read. The problem is that finding 2-3 hours of contiguous unallocated time is somewhat difficult on the best of days. First I have to find wherever I put the book, then I have to see if I have enough time to make any headway on it, then I have to not be interrupted during that time. This makes reading anything of length somewhat difficult and tedious.
However, it appears I've attached all of the above baggage to physical books. Wood pulp and paste. Me vs. the book with lots of pages (that I can never find)**. With the Kindle, I've managed to trick myself into thinking "Of course I have a spare couple of minutes to read a couple of pages.", at which time a couple of hours pass and I've read a solid chunk of a book. Only having to keep track of one physical object helps, too.
This is not really about the Kindle, though. This is about a book I plowed through by way of said Kindle, namely The Night Watch
, by Sergei Lukyanenko.
So, about Night Watch. For those of you who saw the Russian fantasy-horror film of the same name
*, I should point out that the film is (approximately) the first section of a three-section book which tends to get more cerebral as it continues. For those of you who haven't seen the film, it's a pretty straightforward setup... in an alternate Moscow there are slightly-immortal beings known as Others, which tend to be either Good or Evil. They disagree on a few things. Stuff happens. Also, you should really see the film.
I was reading Night Watch while I was already doing a lot of introspection regarding morality and principles, and the book is supersaturated with talk about the balance of good and evil and all the grey places in between that must exist as a direct result. Throw in a metric ton of allegorical discussion about metacognition, and then wrap it up in a urban fantasy-horror story that is very compelling (and very Russian).
In short, Mango-Bob says "check it out."
* which should have won an Academy Award for Best Subtitles. No, really.
** I read the last 10 pages of Watership Down about 10 years after reading the first 450 or so, due to losing the book.
, which is to say "a fairly spiffy eBook reader with a bookstore attached." The most immediate effect of this is that I'm reading a lot more. I'm willing to chalk a small amount of that up to "oooo shiny new toy" but that's not the whole of it. Working Hypothesis: The Kindle lowers my resistance to sitting down and reading.
Put another way, I read at a slower pace than most of my peers. The end result is that I feel like I have to set aside a significant block of time before I can sit down with a book and read. The problem is that finding 2-3 hours of contiguous unallocated time is somewhat difficult on the best of days. First I have to find wherever I put the book, then I have to see if I have enough time to make any headway on it, then I have to not be interrupted during that time. This makes reading anything of length somewhat difficult and tedious.
However, it appears I've attached all of the above baggage to physical books. Wood pulp and paste. Me vs. the book with lots of pages (that I can never find)**. With the Kindle, I've managed to trick myself into thinking "Of course I have a spare couple of minutes to read a couple of pages.", at which time a couple of hours pass and I've read a solid chunk of a book. Only having to keep track of one physical object helps, too.
This is not really about the Kindle, though. This is about a book I plowed through by way of said Kindle, namely The Night Watch
, by Sergei Lukyanenko.So, about Night Watch. For those of you who saw the Russian fantasy-horror film of the same name
*, I should point out that the film is (approximately) the first section of a three-section book which tends to get more cerebral as it continues. For those of you who haven't seen the film, it's a pretty straightforward setup... in an alternate Moscow there are slightly-immortal beings known as Others, which tend to be either Good or Evil. They disagree on a few things. Stuff happens. Also, you should really see the film.I was reading Night Watch while I was already doing a lot of introspection regarding morality and principles, and the book is supersaturated with talk about the balance of good and evil and all the grey places in between that must exist as a direct result. Throw in a metric ton of allegorical discussion about metacognition, and then wrap it up in a urban fantasy-horror story that is very compelling (and very Russian).
In short, Mango-Bob says "check it out."
* which should have won an Academy Award for Best Subtitles. No, really.
** I read the last 10 pages of Watership Down about 10 years after reading the first 450 or so, due to losing the book.
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sounds like a good book
Date: 2010-01-11 04:52 am (UTC)Due to obsessive note-taking...
Date: 2010-01-11 06:36 am (UTC)There's (it seems) spoilers in at least the discussion of book vs film, but I guess that's somewhat inevitable.
I agree with
no subject
Date: 2010-01-11 12:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-11 03:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-11 03:59 pm (UTC)The fact that whatever book I'm currently reading exists in a state of physical superposition with my phone, and therefore is literally always in my pocket, wherever I am, makes all the difference in the world.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-11 05:12 pm (UTC)the watch book series is awesome
Date: 2010-01-11 09:17 pm (UTC)That said, the subtitles in the movie(s) are really spectacular.