My Reading Right Now - How and What

This week's bus book has been The End of the Line by Stephen Lagault. This is a mystery set in western Canada in the 1880s right on the Canadian Pacific Railway construction line and featuring Durrant Wallace, a North West Mounted Police Sergeant who's usually on lighter duties due to his past injuries. This is apparently the first in a future series.

The author, Stephen Legault's, website: http://stephenlegault.com

For Christmas though I was given a Kobo e-reader so I've been reading e-books on the bus too. (My Kobo's name is now Flo.) Most won't be surprised that the first book I bought was by Minda Powers-Douglas, the cemetery enthusiast extraordinaire behind The Cemetery Club website and Epitaphs Magazine. (This is just recently available as an e-book; I do already have a 'paper' copy.)

Next I bought another of her books to add to the Kobo, Translating Tombstones. I have this at home, but why not an e-book too? It could prove useful someday when Flo and I are in a cemetery and I'm peering at a new-to-me symbol.

Next, since Kobo Flo will let me read .pdf files, I loaded a number of other useful genealogy e-books already on my computer into her. Many of these are on Minnie, my netbook, too, so I can easily refer to them when teaching or answering questions.

My more recent purchase though was not to do with cemeteries at all and showed me how helpful Flo could be. Sometimes I really, really want to read a book - right quick! That was the case with Baking as Biography: A Life Story in Recipes by Diane Tye. Here's a review by Kerry Clare.

But when I checked local stores, no one had a copy available. But yes, I could download it right away and start reading. Excellent! (And yes, I ordered myself a real copy too.)

Funny though - when I eagerly opened up the book on the Kobo, I realized that the book is - backwards! Funny, and still readable, but could be very annoying.

So I did write Kobo customer service who told me to delete the book and reload it. Had to look up to find out how to delete and guess what? The 'help' section in my Kobo is also backwards.

I replied to Kobo customer service but - no reply yet.

I'm not too discouraged with the e-book idea, however the Kobo customer service thing is: Sad :-(

A New Year - New Books

Although I certainly haven't been writing much, I have been reading, believe me. And since it's a snowy day here today in Vancouver, BC, Canada, I'm hoping to read this day away.

What's on my side table for this weekend?

The Archivist's Story by Travis Holland (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). This is a novel set in 1939 Russia. Author Isaac Babel is in Lubyanka prison; a young archivist is assigned to incinerate Babel's last stories... Found at my favourite place for new books, and an independent book business, Black Bond Books in Surrey, BC. To be truthful, I picked this one up only because of the title; not many novels about archivists.

Click here for one brief biography of Isaac Babel at the Author's Calendar (written by Petri Liukkonen) and here for Babel's wife, Antonina Pirozhkova's, obituary (written by William Grimes; published in the New York Times, September 22, 2010). She spent much of her later life retrieving and ensuring his literary legacy.

The Nightmare: A Mystery with Mary Wollstonecraft by Nancy Means Wright (McKinleyville, California, USA: Perseverance Press, 2011).
Noticed this at Vancouver Public Library. Now how could I pass a mystery featuring Wollstonecraft up?

And for something quite different,

Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton (New York, USA: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). According to the New York Times, this is an "eye popping" book. Certainly looks so! See a few of the book's images here as selected by the NY Times. Found on holidays in Kelowna at Mosaic Books, another great independent book shop. Look for it if you are travelling in the Okanagan this year.