Digital Book Club

A neglected Kindle…

Hermione: Your Kindle looks tatty.

Viola: You introduced me to it. Years ago. You don’t seem to be using yours much lately.

Hermione: Er, no. Busy, you know.

Viola: We should read more.

Hermione: How about we have a book club? Download the same book to Kindles and post comments by an email thread? One with the highest word count in the comments wins.

Viola: With a limit on copying and pasting from the original text.

Hermione: OK. Ten percent quotes max in the posting. How about a Somerset Maugham?

Viola: Good choice. Very classic. Haven’t read him for fifty years.

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Voice-over

A reading solution for states of emergency or lockdowns. Digital book club to avoid those vociferous virus-laden get-togethers.

End of Year Reading

Cat reading tastes…

Mara: Any suggestions on what books to take to the beach?

Bao: Pack your Kindle. Randomly select.

Mara: What have you been reading lately?

I also purchased
Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Bao: Well, there are heaps, but Adam Sisman’s John le Carré: The Biography, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, and Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods: Discworld are the purchased ones I keep turning back to from the hundred-odd downloaded free samples…

Mara: That is so you. Downloading hundreds of samples and rarely making the commitment to buy the full book.

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Voice-over

And where do we get our suggestions? New York Review of Books. The Guardian. The Economist.

Happy New Year for 2016.

Whatever you are, be a good one.

(attributed to Lincoln, but some say Thackeray)

…

Kindle X-ray Visual Concordancer

Visual Concordancer

Recent Kindle Convert: X-ray. You got this function on your Kindle?

Earlier Kindler Enthusiast: What’s it do?

Recent Kindle Convert: It’s a reference tool. It lists common characters in a book, or locations, or themes, or ideas.

Earlier Kindler Enthusiast: Not on mine.

Recent Kindle Convert: I’ll show you. The book I’m reading at the moment is Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adachie. It’s about Nigerians living between the U.S. and Nigeria. The names are beautiful but not so easy. X-ray can show how often the characters appear which suggests their importance to the narrative. See? By page and chapter and book.

Earlier Kindler Enthusiast: Nice tool.

Recent Kindle Convert: Simple, visual, effective.

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Voice-over

X-ray works as a concordancer.

As a visual text analyzer.

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