February 23, 2011

I am enjoying an early morning respite at the Science Cafe at UWA. The sun is bright, the flat white delectable and I am able to get in a bit of recreational reading before the onset of the day.

My iPad is my new best friend. It’s awesome. Before I left for Australia, I downloaded the Kindle app. The Kindle app enables me to download anything from Amazon. It’s cheap and easy and so convenient.  For the most part I do most of my recreational reading when I travel. There are few distractions such as children, house, laundry or critters. So, in my down-time, I am able to – depending on the length of the trip – chew through two or three novels. I often pick up books in airports.

Recently, I had the opportunity to tele-chat with my good friend, J. Many years ago, we both lived in Saskatoon. Between raising kids, baking cookies, engaging in rousing games of rummy, we would share and talk about books. J and I were a book club before book clubs were ‘cool’. At that time, we got into the Diana Gabaldon series, the first of which is entitled “Outlander.” J brought to my attention that this series would be coming to film in 2013. This, along with an animated, nostalgic conversation with an old friend, incited me to revisit “Outlander.” I bought it on Amazon and downloaded it to my iPad via Kindle.

Outlander is a tome. Six hundred plus pages of historical highlander pageantry, treachery and adventure. Booyeah! Nasty to carry around (weight-wise) and, as a consequence, not too subtle either. Having it available via Kindle accomplishes two things. One, I don’t have to deal with the unbearable weight of a book of that scale in my book bag. Two, I can subtly read about “heaving breasts” and “unsheathed swords” while looking aca-telligent all at the same time. Presumably, these folks in the coffee shop think that I have my nose buried in the works of Schumpeter or Porter or Ostrom or something of the like.

Ha! I sure have them fooled!

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” ~ Bertrand Russell