Back From The Dead

Well, I'm not back from clinical death, just from feeling like it. I still don't have a theory to explain it, but I increasingly think I brought back microbial friends from Mexico who proceeded to ravage me up one side and down the other for a couple of weeks. I'm sure there's a stress element as well. But whatever the cause, for a couple of weeks I was sick as a dog that had been eating out of the cat litter box. It was all I could do to simply go to work, and sometimes I wasn't entirely successful in that, and when I got home at night I merely collapsed like an Appalachian barn in a windstorm and waited for the next day of workaday tedium.

But lately I've started to feel better. Today was a regular Friday off, and I did nothing last night or today but read and sleep, which I think are activities hazardous to Mexican microbes. Specifically, I've been tinkering with my new Kindle.

A Kindle is a variety of ebook, the Amazon version thereof, and I confess I'm quite taken with the gadget. Friends of ours sent it to me as a gift, sort of a "we can't fix cancer but we can give you something to read" gift. It's approximately the size of an old-style steno pad (but thinner) and it reads surprisingly well. It displays about a half a page at a time in the default font size, but after a few minutes of adjustment the mind accepts the half-size format quite well. Best of all, if you lay it down and fall asleep, it likewise goes to sleep and remembers where you were, so when you wake up and reach for it, it's right where you left off - no more remembering to shove an empty Alka-Seltzer packet in the book as a bookmark before nodding off.

It is kind of amusing on first glimpse, though. It comes in a black pressboard tray that looks for all the world like high-end Chinese takeout, as though the mailman dropped off an order of kung pao chicken instead of a Kindle. It comes preloaded with a dictionary, which is fun enough, but last night at about 11 PM I decided to see if I could buy a new book. The process is so easy as to be rather mysterious. You wiggle the mouse-like knob on the front a few times, you type in a few letters in the search box, and suddenly by means Harry Potter might understand the book arrives on your Kindle. I don't think it took more than a minute or two to find the book I wanted, and no more than a minute or two to download. Within five minutes, not even enough time to go to the fridge for some apple juice, the book was loaded and ready to view, complete with photographs.

Amazing. I'd always assumed that ebooks would involve a lot of clunky setup of wireless networks and whatnot, and maybe some do. This one apparently works on the cell phone network, not the wireless Ethernet in the house, but I could be mistaken. I haven't fully read the user's manual yet, and frankly, who's interested in the technical details anyway? The lack of any billing questions, however, makes me think that my friends paid for the book, not me. I'm going to have to figure out how to change the billing information before I do the Harry Potter Bookus Immediaticus spell again.

I chose as my first book The Ayatollah Begs To Differ, a sort of conversational look at politics and society in post-1979 Iran, or what the author fairly diligently refers to as the Islamic Republic. It's quite a good book, though sometimes when I'm sleepy the profusion of jawbreakingly complex Iranian names can get a little confusing (sort of like The Brothers Karamazov, only a different set of complex names). It also serves to highlight the differences between Presidents Khatami and Ahmadinejad, "reformer" on the one hand and ultraconservative on the other. And the main takeaway is that it is foolish on our part to expect Iranian democracy to look like secular Western democracy - but that it doesn't necessarily have to be frightening either. I am fairly conversant with Shia Islam, at least in the main, but the book does a particularly good job of showing what Shia Islam looks like on the ground, to the millions of people who believe it and practice it (the difference, if you will, between understanding what cancer is and then discovering what it actually feels like, not that I am in any way suggesting that Shia is a form of cancer; I'm merely working with the analogies that come to hand).

Back to my Kindle!