MemeMachineGo!

I heard of Chris Roberson's Book of Secrets on SF Signal and this excerpt hooked me immediately.

My brother and I once met at a bar, and fell to talking about family. Parents, kids, relatives, the whole sick crew. He took issue with the idea about children being some link to the future, our bid at immortality. Parents, he says, are our true link to eternity. In each of us is a little bit of each of our parents, literally and figuratively, and in each of our parents a bit of theirs, and so on and so forth. All the way back to the Garden of Eden or the Primordial Ooze, depending upon your politics. Looking at our parents reminds us of eternity, he went on, because in them we can see everything that came before. Our parents remind us of the steaming piles of history it took to get to the present moment - in our case, the two of us into that bar on that night at that particular moment. Considering we hadn't looked at our parents since my brother and I were both five years old, watching their caskets being lowered into the ground, shuffling our feet and wishing it would stop raining, it was somewhat surprising. But that's my brother for you.

What that has to do with anything I'm not sure, except to say that it concerns family and eternity, two things which factor greatly into the events of the past week. It began in the bleary-eyed hours of the morning, with a phone in one hand and a telegram in the other, and ended with me watching the setting sun, the secret history of mankind clutched to my chest.

Who wouldn't follow the author anywhere after that? So I did, and I was greatly enjoying the ride. The mystery was engrossing and promising. It had some great characters. But I was ultimately left frustrated and disappointed.

Yesterday, I did something that rocked my world.

I replaced my library card.

After 15 years in Berkeley, I'd worn the old one out. It was chipped and peeling and feeling brittle. The librarian kindly waived the card-replacement fee -- I'd like to imagine that replacing a worn out card instead of a lost one warmed the cockles of her librarian heart.

With the new cards, you get both a credit card-sized card and a little keychain card, so Pocahontas could take the keychain card and pick up items I have on hold, just like I carry her big one so I can pick up hers. (She's picked up plenty of my hold items, but we had to remember to pass my card back and forth.)

The part that rocked my world is that I also got a new card number. And I don't know what it is. It's how you access your account online, and I could rattle off my old 14-digit library card number more easily than my phone number. And now I have no idea and have to resort to looking.

I've been using the library online more often, because they finally have a feature I've wanted for years -- you can save arbitrary lists of library holdings as reminders of things you'd like to check out some time. Naturally, thought I, you should also be able to ask the system what's on your list that's available at a given branch, so you could leave with it right then and there.

Except you can't. You have to check each item one by one to see what its availability is.

Ah well. It's still a good feature and it has resulted in me using the library more.

Barnes & Noble is selling refurbished Nooks for $99. The recent update to its firmware has eliminated, to my satisfaction, one of the biggest drawbacks e-ink screens have had: the screen flash and the time it takes to change a page. It's now very noticeably faster, and close enough to instant.

While I remain not a fan of the capacitive touchscreen, and I consider buying DRM-ed books a non-starter, having a pleasant way to read all the public domain and other freely available books and stories out there makes it well worth it.

Instapaper does a pretty amazing job of converting web content for reading on an ebook reader. I've barely scratched how useful it could be for reading long articles or stories not distributed as an epub. Instasaver makes it even easier for Firefox users.

I've now read Starfish, Dracula, Four and Twenty Blackbirds (it was one of several ebooks available free for a limited time through a tor.com promotion), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and a lot of shorter things. I've also taken to reading my writers group's stories for critique on my Nook instead of printing them out.

And I have enough interesting things stacked in it to guarantee I won't run out of reading material on a trip (barring device failure or electrical shortage, of course.)

On balance, I'm happy to have an e-reader.