The Boy Who Considered Buying A Kindle

I went to the gym today, which seems to be my unimaginative way to commemorate the start of the week; having done some exercise, I'm then either too complacent or too exhausted to contemplate returning for another week.

Gradually, I'm beginning to recognise some of the people there: there's a resolute old duffer who spends all his time on the stepmaster, some angry looking chap sprinting on the treadmill, and a succession of people who row for a bit then go away to do something else. I wonder if anyone recognises me. Maybe for somebody I'm that bloke who perspires too much while looking very bloody cross. I guess it's an image of a sort.

Today I've been roadtesting a Kindle that a friend lent me, and I have to say that I'm quite impressed. I've managed to chug my way through 20% (the Kindle doesn't believe in page numbers) of The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo, which is an improvement on two years ago, when I didn't get that far. Or a deterioation, because I've had to read 20% of The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo* (let's just bite the bullet and call it TGWADT) and that's not much of a treat. The trouble is either that Larsson had a tin ear, and the translator has faithfully reproduced it, or the translator has a tin ear, or Larsson just wanted everyone to sound awfully cliched, as if they couldn't manage an original line of dialogue in their lives. There's people who in fact do not having certain problems, come to roughly this conclusion or that conclusion on the basis of things, and are the only Swedes who measure temperature in Fahrenheit, not Celsius, which is a bit rich. I mean, if you're going to swap the units of measurement about with aplomb, why not translate 'tunnelbana' into 'underground train' while you're at it?

Perhaps I should check with my Swedish friends, but all of them seem to be able to express themselves both precisely and beautifully. Although that is when they're speaking English. For all I know, Swedish is a dull and miserable tongue, without joy or excitement or believable dialogue.

It's a bit late for me to be hopping aboard the backlash bandwagon. Maybe if I'd got through the book when I first attempted it, back in March 2008, I would have been ahead of the game, but in those pre-Kindle days, when I risked injury picking the dashed thing up, it was more than I could endure.

And the book does move along quite quickly, although it would go quicker still if there wasn't so much infernal exposition to wade through. Fairly good airplane fodder, although recommending a book by saying it's good when you're trapped in a flying metal tube full of explosive fuel with nothing else to read is damning with faint praise.

Anyways, the Kindle is easier to read one handed than a paperback. The lack of page numbers makes it a bit more difficult to flick back through (I would have quoted more of TGWADT, but randomly flicking through pages is still more easily accomplished with a physical book than the Kindle.) It's readable in daylight, although standing on Queen's Road in Central with the morning sunlight dappling its screen, it still wasn't as easy to read as a book. But it's light, and books are readily accessible, and I think these two points will provoke me to a purchase before the year is out. Given how expensive books are in Hong Kong, and how many I read, I believe it should only take me about three months to break even on the deal.

Anyway, tomorrow it may enrage me when I find it doesn't treat PDFs as well as I would expect, but that's a test for day 2. Now I'm off to read the New Yorker, as possibly one of my last dead-tree-publishing experiences, and then collapse into sleep.

* OK, I was tired, it's actually the The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but that abbreviates to the frankly unpronounceable TGWTDT, so I won't be going there.