What I'm Reading This Week (August 25, 2024)

 

Despite my being totally distracted all week, I did finish two books this past week, Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty and A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle. Talty's collection of short stories really worked for me and I'll be putting something together on the book relatively soon. And Doyle's Sherlock Holmes opener reminded me again just how skillful a storyteller Doyle was, so I ended up having an enjoyable reading week despite myself.

My biggest time-killer turned out to be my sudden urge to sort through all the e-books I've managed to scatter all over my computer drive over the last several years. It's like they had all been sucked into some immense black hole never to be seen again even though I have around 450 of them on various Kindle readers. So far I've turned up something like another 60 e-books that never made it to a Kindle, and of course have never been read. Some of the files have been corrupted beyond use and won't open, and others have bad metadata associated with the files, so it has been a struggle to figure out if they are even still readable. 

I went down this new rabbit hole after being reminded again that the purchase of an e-book doesn't really mean that you own anything. According to Amazon and others, we are all more or less just leasing e-books for some period of time that they decide is appropriate. There's nothing to keep a company like Amazon from deciding no longer to support a particular book or author and removing all trace of them from their wondrous cloud. I'm not sure what that means if you've already downloaded the book to your device, but I've been led to believe that even if you have, you lose access to the suddenly missing book. Even it that's not the case, you certainly do lose any possibility of downloading if you haven't already done so, or if you have read and removed it earlier, of being able to re-load it. 

So I have spent hours and hours using Calibre software to reformat my hundreds of e-books into the epub format from the Kindle exclusive azw3 format necessary to read them on a Kindle device - which means I have about 450 e-books in two formats now, sometimes three. Not the most efficient use of hard drive space, but this way I'm at least able to save copies of everything on my computer and backup drives - and I'm in control of who owns them, not Amazon.

Doing all of this also allowed me to buy my first Kobo reader (their color model, the Libra) and upload all the original Kindle books to the new Kobo reader. It's kind of fun to see all the covers in color again, along with whatever color was added to the book pages, too. Without having reformatted all the Amazon books that transfer would not have been possible. 

It's not only books, and it's not only Amazon, that can leave you high and dry with no access to something you believed was your property. Just in the last few days, for instance, Redbox pulled the plug on all the digital movie content it had sold over the last few years to customers who thought they owned it forever. Redbox is now gone...and so are the movies. Anyway, that's what ate up so much of my time last week...sorry to ramble on as long as I did about it. Oh, and I'm not done yet with that project.

Coming into this week, I find myself down to the last 75 pages of Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West and well into Huxley's Brave New World along with a couple of others.

Brave New World, written in 1932, is classic dystopian fiction. It's one of those stories in which the entire world has collapsed in on itself without most of its inhabitants even recognizing how bad things are for all but the chosen few. And in this case, people are definitely chosen, even before birth, for the job and societal level they will live at until they die. It's all done via unethical science, brainwashing techniques, censorship, and hiding the truth from everyone. Even those in charge, by now, don't really know how dark their "brave new world" has grown.

Wow, is this good! This is my first time reading anything by Carol O'Connell, and I probably made a poor choice by beginning with book ten of her Mallory series, but I'm really loving The Chalk Girl at almost its halfway point. Kathy Mallory (don't dare ever call her by her first name because that irritates the fire out of this young police detective) is one of the more unique series characters I've run across in a long time. She's a sociopath of sorts with very little time to worry about even faking social skills and she's always on the brink of being fired despite her obvious crime-solving prowess.

S.R. Wilsher's The Collection of Heng Souk is one of those e-books I rescued from oblivivion last week. It was published in 2016, and I have no idea why I have it, but the title of the book made me curious enough to begin reading the first few pages and now I'm hooked. It's set in Hanoi in the present day and is about a young doctor (who is married to a jerk of a police detective) who only learns that she has an elderly uncle after her father dies and leaves a package to be delivered to the man. Heng Souk, the uncle, as it turns out, was an interrogator for the North Vietnam army during the war years. 

I'm turning up so much interesting stuff as I continue my e-book cleanup that I have no idea what I'll be reading this time next week. As frustrating as it has been at times, this project is, I think, finally going to get me to look closely at each of the e-books I "own" and begin finally to read some of the ones that I've overlooked for way too long.

I hope all of you have great reading weeks as the summer months begin to come to a close. We are hoping for some relief from the heat down here, and are kind of holding our breaths as we work our way through the rest of hurricane season. Have fun!