I'm still reading through Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself and enjoying it very much, but the similar format of each entry is weighing slightly on that enjoyment. They're too short, unfortunately. While the content is still very good, Bryson's unable to go into enough depth on some topics in these three- to four-page essays to really cover them as effectively and hilariously as he does in his longer works. Maybe part of it is also that he didn't have much time to put each of these together before it needed to be published originally. Some bits are convulsively funny, absolutely classic must-reads for any middle-aged American, and the rest is good examples of short humorous prose, so I still highly recommend the book to any Bryson fans and also to anyone interested in the works of Dave Barry and Garrison Keilor, but it's probably number three on my favorite Bryson books list.

I so lied when I said content would pick up last post ... Just had a bunch of other stuff going on in meatspace, but I'm back. I think I'll just blorp out a mish-mash and let you poor folks slog through it rather than splitting into separate tech and "-lish" posts, so hold on tight.

Neil Gaiman recently made some headlines by releasing his masterwork American Gods for free. If you haven't read this book, I can't recommend it enough. Gaiman is unsurpassed at creating modern mythology that dips deeply into prior mythological work, and American Gods and the Sandman graphic novels are not only Gaiman's best, but the best literary works of the genre, and definitely among the best works of modern fictional storytelling. It's free now, so go git it!

I've begun reading Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself, a collection of short articles that Bryson wrote for a British readership after moving back to America. They are absolutely hilarious diatribes about various oddities of American life delivered with Bryson's brilliant blend of razor wit and deep reverence. This may be his best, narrowly beating out In a Sunburned Land as my top Bill Bryson book. Bryson's neck and neck right now with Dave Barry as my top literary humorist.

Moving on through the "-lish", here's an unbelievably cool tropes wiki. What's a trope? From the front page of TV Tropes, they are "devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations." This means tropes are important to writers, critics, and anyone else interested in modern story-telling, including roleplaying gamers. It also means absolutely fascinating reading because the entries are just about everything but dry.

I found some gems of awfulness on the TV Tropes "So Bad It's Horrible" entry to share. Beware, these are toxic. First, The Eye of Argon, one of the most terrible fantasy epics ever. (This is "terrible" in the senses of both really bad and terribly violent at the same time) Next, widely regarded as the worst poem in English, I present the short horror of Theophilus Marzials's "A Tragedy".

Finally, in the roleplaying game category are two stinky examples of So Bad It's Horrible that I have to spotlight. The second is near and dear to my heart, as you'll see. Read this review of FATAL. FATAL was an RPG that I got maybe a page and a half into before I completely wiped my freely-obtained copy online somewhere. There's a link to the FATAL PDF at the top of the review if you're really desperate. I'd rather say I'm not linking to it than linking to it. Then there's the Wraeththu roleplaying game. As some of you may recall, I subjected myself to the first Wraeththu novel and started on the second before tossing the whole series out as utter rubbish, so this review of how terrible the RPG is strikes a sympathetic chord with me. The review's more oriented toward gameworld and setting analysis than system mechanics, and it's hi-lariously harsh. Shockingly, people are evidently paying money for the Wraeththu game.

I'm done with purely literary topics for this post. As a bridge to tech topics, here's an interesting article about "cultural" aspects of free operating system users (i.e. Linux). Especially interesting are items 5 and 6 in the list: "Free software users explore" and "Free software users expect to help themselves". In other words, free software users tend to be more confident and technically savvy with technological tools, something I find to be generally true. Linux nerds, ho!

Speaking of Linux, Anyone mounting FUSE filesystems under Linux should check this article out about setting up afuse, a FUSE filesystem automounter. I'm using FUSE to ssh into my iPod Touch, but I have a pair of scripts I run manually to do the mount and unmount of the FUSE filesystem that are working fine for me. Still, automation is good, right? So I might look into this on down the road.

Finally, I present InfoWorld's all-time top 25 flops list. I disagree heartily with some of these, such as iPod imitators, and wanted to link this up to air my strong ongoing opinion that money flows from sources to media makers to promote their products. I don't have any evidence to back this up on this particular article, but just from the iPod imitators entry I have to wonder how much InfoWorld and/or the author of this article benefits from Apple. My iRiver media player beats the shizzle out of my iPod Touch in one major area: media compatibility. I like Ogg Vorbis audio much more than MP3, so thanks to Apple's unwillingness to allow their media players to play this totally free compressed audio format, I'm highly inconvenienced. Dicks. There are workarounds, but why should I have to go there? Just open it up, Apple! Sorry, started ranting a little there. I also disagree with other entries in the list, such as the PS/2. The PS/2 wasn't popular with consumers, but it was an important interim step in the evolution of PC hardware that shouldn't just be discounted as an outright failure, for example. So this is thought-provoking on a couple levels for people who've been teching for a while.

Adam Boeglin, the excellent porter of various apps to the iRex iLiad, generated a new FBReader version a month or two ago. I plopped it excitedly onto my iLiad and found that I have almost no use for the new version unless I can get it to be the default reader for .txt files and I can access the options to change the font and alter text formatting for different files. This bums me out, because otherwise, it looks to be a nice update. Adam's now beating on a usable browser for the iLiad that looks hawt, but I'm browsing via my iPod Touch these days if I need a portable browser.

One more note about the iLiad and then this post's toast. I have read bunches of formats of ebooks on my iLiad and I have to say that the iLiad-formatted PDF offerings at Feedbooks are the finest. You download a book, move it to the iLiad, find it in the iLiad's hierarchy, pop it open, and stop thinking you're reading something in an electronic format. No resizing, fine legibility, and the flexibility of the iLiad's built-in PDF reader all combine into an excellent, seamless reading experience. Bravo, Feedbooks!

HowTo Convert a Friend to Linux starts out hilarious and proceeds into thoughtful and helpful advice on this nerdtastic topic. One thing I thought was most interesting was the lack of dual booting or usage of a secondary system for Linux immersion. Both of these things have proven invaluable for me, a PC gamer who needs Windows to play many games on, and those fallback measures should prove at least useful for others.

In other news, IPv6 may be coming to a root DNS server near you on February 4 of this year. What does this mean? It means that full end to end IPv6 over the Internet will become possible without the use of any IPv4 (aka "The Way TCP-IP Is Now") hardware. It also means that sysadmins should check their DNS servers and firewalls for compatibility, though not IPv6 compatibility but with the ability to send and receive packets over 512 bytes in size. See the article for more details.

IPv6 is definitely coming, folks, and while IPv4's still going to be going strong for years, IPv6 is eventually going to beat it down. My prediction is that in five years IPv6 will be the predominant protocol used in new networks. Late this year I plan to look at my network hardware and nodes and see what I'd need to upgrade to IPv6. I probably won't make the switch, even partially, until 2009 at the very earliest, but we'll see.

Feedbooks.com, one of my favorite online book sources, has a rough beta of their iNewsStand software available for the iRex iLiad. I haven't tried it yet, but this service is poised to be a killer app for any ebook reader that supports it, able to bring in RSS feeds, Web-based news, books, Sudoku puzzles, and possibly other information and interactivity right onto the ereading device. It appears that FeedBooks already has a working Kindle version of this application. Bravo!

In other iLiad news, I find that browsing on the thing is just too slow. But reading a lot of text or PDFs on the iLiad is like night and day vs. the iPod Touch. There's no comparison at all. One funny side effect of the iPod Touch's touch screen is that the more you use it with your finger, the more finger grease ends up making reading a little tougher. It's never enough to seriously affect usability, but it's there. The screen's too small for serious text reading, but it's fine for interactive fiction and general Web browsing. Decent for Google Reader, too, with Google's special mobile device formatting. But for anything of decent size, the iLiad's the way to go. I like it more than regular paper books now.

I've been exchanging paper books with a friend lately and recently finished up her copy of Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko. I liked it a lot as a variation on the usual "world of dark scariness" type of story. There are vampires and shapeshifters and other Others in it and all of this works in the context of the stories, with explanations given as needed while the plot unfolds in each of the three parts like a chess game. Readers may be able to guess what's going on before the end of each story, which is also extremely fun. The absolutes of morality figure strongly into the novel's overarching plot and themes, and by the end of the final part, readers have a full understanding not only of the main character, but the nature of the epic struggle between the Light and the Darkness. There is also a hint of information about a third group, the Inquisition, which oversees the actions of the two more active groups, leaving plenty of space open for more exploration. Night Watch is an English translation of a Russian book, and so some Russian mannerisms, such as stating a person's full name fairly frequently during conversation, show through, but these don't detract from the book so much as ensure that the reader knows the action happens in a non-English-speaking part of the world. I'm looking forward to reading the next books in the series.

My friend seems to be into dark sorts of stories, having also loaned me a modern Japanese Lord of the Flies tale called Battle Royale and another book called Wraeththu. Battle Royale is almost unreadable for me, basically looking more like a gratuitous slaughterfest than a revisitation of the morality play that Lord of the Flies presents. I'm going to plow through Battle despite the occasional survivor count notices plastered throughout the text because it's supposedly much more subtle than it seems. Wraeththu, written by Storm Constantine, is about Young Hermaphroditic Mutants In Love, and after reading the first novel of the trilogy between this book's covers, I can't stomach more. I don't understand why there are so many weird names for places, people, and things, or why most members of this astoundingly powerful new race have such gigantic, sappy relationship hangups. Constantine has generated a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting pregnant with interesting story possibilities, but it seems as if he's using it as an outlet for Anne Rice-esque passionate vampire stories that are dissimilar enough to Rice's tales to avoid being lumped wholesale into the same cauldron with Poppy Z. Brite and others of that genre. I guess I'm not into "standard" romance genre fare, even with mutants and magic.

I'm definitely more picky about literature than I thought I was a few months ago. Maybe it's that I have so much to read now via my iLiad and my threshold for what I want to spend time on has risen as a result. I also got three Sandman graphic novels and some Bill Bryson books from one of my stepdaughters for Christmas and dammit, they're calling to me, so maybe that impatience is a factor right now... I'll post something more about Battle Royale after I finish it.

And finally, I started in on an Agatha Christie public domain novel called The Secret Adversary. So far I'm enjoying it as a variation on my usual fare and as a fine introduction to Christie's general writing style. I see why her work's so popular, with its engaging dialog and characterizations. I've been warned, though, that I shouldn't try to figure out who's done what until the very end, as Christie's notorious for bringing in extra characters and such during the final exposition scene, making correct deduction extremely difficult if not impossible in her stories. It's fun light reading, making a fine contrast with my other recent reading.

Aha! I've reached the point where Pip's fortunes .. shift. Now I'm hooked into Great Expectations again. Well done, Mr. Dickens, well done.

Side note about the iRex iLiad: It recharges pretty quickly for how much usage time you get per charge. They're evidently working on yet another big update that will improve default readability for letter-sized PDFs and other things. I'm looking forward to using it a ton while I recover from surgery.

With a bit of wire snipping and reconnecting, I've managed to get the 12- to 10-volt adapter and the Evercool fan into the NS4300N much more effectively, blocking MUCH less airflow and so far, appearing to work so good. Noise is reduced tremendously, to the point where the drives are what I hear rather than fan noise, though there is a small power supply fan that is barely audible. Temperatures seem to be hovering in the low 40C range, most spiffily chilly for a piece of electronica. If you have the means, I highly recommend doing this.

In other news, I'm still enjoying Great Expectations, coming up to the 1/4 way through mark. Seems like Pip's a fairly miserable young man so far, with plenty of interesting experiences, but still quite unhappy overall. I'm looking forward to a change, if one comes, and some tying together of what appear to be fairly disparate pieces of the tale. I find myself wondering why this is a classic. Maybe I'm looking too hard :(

I have a lot of book reviewing for this post, thanks to the amount of time since my last one... Sorry about that. I'll follow up with a technical post a little later, but for now, I have to relate my experiences with some of the best literature I've read in years.

I've absorbed Neil Gaiman's masterful American Gods and liked it very, very much. Like Gaiman's "Sandman" graphic novels, American Gods masterfully blends modern "mythology" with classic mythology around the world, resulting in a view of the world and the things in it that seems plausible and yet fanciful at the same time. One of the things I liked most about this book is Gaiman's modernization of old gods and goddesses. Gaiman is probably the foremost author on the planet at that kind of thing, and since I'm a big sucker for that kind of stuff, that makes Gaiman one of my favorite storytellers. I also enjoyed the character progression and the pace of the thing. American Gods has a similar action speed to Tim Powers's novels (and it might be said that the two authors somewhat overlap in their generation of modern mythology), but not as breakneck-fast as, say, Dan Brown's works. We start with what seems like an ordinary person who is contacted by a strange man who knows too much, then as the story continues, the immense web of intrigue surrounding our hero slowly becomes apparent, ending in his making a choice that changes the world, or at least America. Sort of. You'll have to read the book to find out. By the way, Gaiman's Anansi Boys is a "spiritual" (heheh) sequel to Gods with a smaller scope. Boys is more humorous, but resonates with Gods as a tale of mythological evolution. I don't recommend reading one without the other closely following.

The Bluest Eye is another marvelously-written tale about a young black girl growing up with a highly damaged image of self-beauty. The author, Toni Morrison, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and her mastery of writing-craft shows eloquently in this book. As readers find out more about Pecola, the primary character, the shocking conclusion becomes inevitable, but even though I saw it coming, I still nearly wept. Eye treads ground somewhere near Flannery O'Connor's realm of dark American prose, but Morrison's novel takes its time drawing the reader in, resulting in a more devastating psychological blow than O'Connor's short stories. Much more cannot really be revealed about the novel's contents without damaging the experience for other readers. However, I will say that this is an outstanding piece of American semi-historical fiction, nearly on par with To Kill a Mockingbird for its importance in discussing American social issues, but Eye is much more focused on the more global topic of perception of personal beauty. The setting is America, but the major themes are applicable to just about any modern society. Any serious literature fan should dive into The Bluest Eye, but be warned that it may leave a permanent mark. Here's a link to more about the book.

I finished Me Talk Pretty One Day, too, and loved it. David Sedaris's blunt candor figures into the wonderful humor of the book as much as his cutting wit. His humor and style are not as positive as Bill Bryson's, and people who don't care for sarcasm should just say no to Sedaris, but for those who like to watch his brand of intelligence in action, this set of essay-like pieces about Sedaris's past is an impressive source of grins and wry chuckles.

One last epic fell to a voracious reading orgy while on my honeymoon cruise and the week after. Perhaps this one requires a separate post to describe, but I'll set down my thoughts about it here. I read all four parts of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun. This monumental work is a chronicle of Severian's rise from torturer to pretty much in charge of humanity on the planet Urth. The story is set on an Earth of the far, far future, where the Sun is in decline, the Moon has been terraformed such that its reflected light is green, and a fairly structured society that incorporates ancient technology, mutation, and mythology into a cohesive whole. Time travel eventually figures into the plot, as do aliens, as may be expected, but the technology is presented as scientific but semi-magical concepts by the narrator... It's a bit hard to describe. Most importantly, it works to create one of the most immersive fantasy settings I've encountered.

Probably the best starting point for reading these is Neil Gaiman's "How to Read Gene Wolfe", and perhaps trying out one or more of the stories from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" series before diving in. New Sun is dense stuff, and while it's complete in and of itself, some prep work may be required for casual readers to enjoy the ride. This is probably the reason that this Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement author hasn't been more widely recognized: his work isn't aimed at the average reader.

I thought that some of New Sun's prose was meandering crap for a while, but suddenly, like complex poetry, the whole snapped into my mental view. I discovered that the work is highly structured and that while the narrator is unreliable, Wolfe isn't: readers are given all of the information they need to determine what actually happens in every situation in the book. Everything hangs together to form a coherent whole. For example, the occasional "historical" divergences from a brown book that Severian, the protagonist and narrator, carries with him hold clues to understanding other parts of the story rather than just being frivolous meanderings. A set of seemingly unrelated stories from many different social classes and peoples toward the end of the last quarter of the novel adds important details to the canvas that Wolfe paints Severian's story onto. The question of who Severian's parents are, a topic touched on lightly but persistently, is answered obliquely but definitively by the end of the novel. I am still somewhat stunned by the scope, the complexity, the breadth, and the depth of The Book of the New Sun and will definitely be rereading it at least a couple more times to pick up more from it.

Lovers of grim epic fantasies who don't mind a bit of extra thinking will probably enjoy The Book of the New Sun. It's not for the faint of heart and doesn't have the same simple grandeur of The Lord of the Rings, but I found its huge, thorough scope, deep and complex themes, and towering majesty extremely enjoyable once I got used to it. I'm looking forward to future rereadings, something unusual for me.

As I said at the beginning of this massive missive, these books have comprised some of the best reading I've done in years. I'm almost at a loss as to what to follow up with, but fortunately there are sequels and other excellent works from other authors to read.

In the meantime, I'm zipping through Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing, a book that has taught me more about grammar in its first twenty pages than years of English. It's a great self-help book for authors and would-be authors from a copy editor's perspective.

1,000 Places You Should See Before You Die is going through spots in the United States for its last pages and I got a bit bored of it, so I picked up Gene Wolfe's The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories again to read through the stories and see if I could glean more from them. Wolfe's work's amazing, and most of the tales he weaves hit home in me, but this time, perhaps the third read through, I'm getting a lot more out of it than I did before.

The main story of the book is called "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories", so Wolfe just tacked "and Other Stories" onto it to title the collection. Funny, no? Funnier still is the inclusion of two other stories with the same general words in the titles, "The Death of Dr. Island" and "The Doctor of Death Island". "The Death of Dr. Island" is a Nebula winner for best novella, and the story I'm reading right now. Wolfe weaves deep psychosocial commentary and some fascinating sci-fi into a dark semi-coming-of-age package.

Most of Wolfe's works seem to have a dip in shadow, but they aren't dark just for the heck of it; Wolfe wants to talk about things that hide in the corners and underbelly of society. If this sounds interesting to you, go get some of his writings. I'm going to stick his The Book of the New Sun on my Amazon.com wishlist right now.

Everything I Know About Parenting I Learned From My Puppy is a cute book, filled with adorable illustrations of puppies at play, and it is pleasantly laid out. The title, however, is a little bit misleading. The book is somewhat unfocused, containing not only decent, sound advice on parenting puppies and human children, but also some stories glorifying dog ownership, the dog/human bond, and an occasional jarring Christian reference that detracts from the overall quality of the advice.

A story in the book about 9/11 refers to Genesis to explain just how dark and quiet everything is after one tower's fall. This metaphor isn't a problem, since the pre-Creation darkness described in Genesis works very well. Most readers can appreciate the simile. But then the author includes a direct Bible quotation in case the reader isn't sure what part of Genesis the author means, jumping firmly into overkill territory.

It's a matter of focus. A book about puppies and children and parenting isn't expected to contain direct religious references. It jars the cohesion of the whole. Again, passing mention of Christian symbols would be fine, since Christian metaphors pervade Western psychology, but balance is important, and direct Bible quotations aren't remotely necessary in this book.

That said, the pictures are mighty cute, and there are some excellent pieces of wisdom to be found here. One of my favorite sections describes puppies and chewing: They just do it. Get used to it and pick things up that they might get into, it says. We see this here just about every day as our puppy chews up things that us silly humans should have put out of her considerable reach. The book has a few other gems like this that definitely make it a worthwhile read for puppy and child owners.

In other news, it looks like I won't be reading anything to review for a bit. I'm plowing through 1,000 Places to See Before You Die right now, skipping the massive number of hotels and restaurants, and then I'll finish up Orson Scott Card's excellent treatise on characters and viewpoint. After that, though, I'll dive into David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day and will post my thoughts on that. I do, however, have some more technical things to gab about, thanks to everything changing so quickly in the technical arena, but that can definitely wait.

Just a grab bag of miscellany today that I've gathered like balls of cat hair over the past week or so that I haven't posted anything here. A potpourri, if you will, of variously-smelly things. Be sure not to inhale too deeply if anyone important is watching or you plan to run for public office.

Here's a new Windows Notepad replacement I'm going to be playing with at work: TED Notepad is free, fast, feature rich. It's better by far than reg'lar Notepad because it can sort and do other manipulations of textual content that I find myself performing from time to time in the process of logging activities at work.

Ubuntu Dapper Drake doesn't understand my 4-port USB hub. Very odd. This means that my laptop wouldn't be able to have a decent pointing device, one of my funky keyboards, my external USB hard drive or a thumb drive, and my iRiver H340 all connected up at the same time. I haven't tried out my USB sound/speaker setup under Dapper Drake yet, but expect it not to work either.

I'm still finding other annoyances with this version of Linux, mainly in the class of hardware that doesn't work right with it, but still am pretty sure that they'll be addressed in future Ubuntu releases. So I might fiddle with Edgy Eft in a while here. I can't express how valuable having a crash and burn laptop is when testing this stuff out. I don't mean hardware crash and burn, I mean software/OS. Kickass. Still considering more RAM for the laptop. Turns out that I have a pair of 256 meggers in the thing rather than one 512 megger, which means I could get a 1 gigger and leave in one of the 256 meggers. Even if I just drop back to XP, extra RAM is a good thing.

No, I'm still not going to buy Vista unless there's some killer app that I must have, like a game that grabs my testicles like a bear trap and doesn't let go. Fat chance, that, I tend to wear titanium undies in case of just such an emergency.

And now, a rant on thinking and the training of young humans:

I think, therefore I think I am.

Think or thwim!

One of the terrible things I've noted about America's modern education system is that kids come out of it unable to think for themselves. The basic reasoning process has somehow gone awry, replaced by a tendency to whine until someone helps complete a project. Mind you, not all of them end up this way. I have a few excellent counter-examples, but they seem to be exceptions. This new generation of non-thinkers has learned to depend on others, such as adults, for their success. What will happen when they get old and the resources they depend on get older? Will they turn to the next generation for assistance, figure out how to handle things on their own, or just wither?

Think. Think about what you're tryin' to do to me.

Italicized semi-quotations entered just for the hell of it. It made sense a few hours ago, but I'm not so sure now. What do you think?

Finally, for now, some bits about reading. I finished "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and loved it. The pieces are all put into place, the suspicion grows and is dismissed as ludicrous by the protagonist, and then, then final incontrovertible evidence is dropped. Most fascinating about this is the way that the lure of the metamorphosis is described, the desire to let the evil side of human nature run free. It is a sad story of a man who cannot deny the baser nature he has unleashed, despite his conscious efforts.

I've followed that up with John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise and am grinning at just about every page, laughing out loud at about every other. Hodgman's one of my current heroes, a master of dry, absurdist, tall tale humor. If you haven't seen him on The Daily Show (he's their Resident Expert), you probably have seen his "I'm a PC .. and I'm a Mac" commercials. He's the PC, the guy looking like Dr. Bunsen Honeydew. Hodgman's humor lies in his audience being able to discern what is and isn't true in his statements. It's thinky stuff in that respect, and I like thinky funnies.

I thought some more about Dracula and the vampire sex connection last night, and it struck me like a stake through the heart: The scene where many of the characters in Stoker's story break into a room to find Mina sucking on the vampire's bloody man-boob is the key. Duh, I said to myself, what an ultra-maroon am I.

It'd only garner a PG-13 rating these days, maybe a light R, but Stoker's description cements the connection. Dracula sucks on Mina's neck for a bit, then gashes his own chest and shoves her mouth up to the wound so she has to swallow his blood to breathe. At that point, our heroes burst into the room. We don't get Mina's description of the acts leading up to the resulting image, but we do gather from the accounts of at least two of the male characters that they are are dazed, horrified, shocked, and other adjectives. Normally, it would just be a supremely awkward moment: a married woman caught kissing the chest of a man who isn't her husband. "I say, unhand my wife lest I forcibly insult you!" might be Jonathan's reaction. But add the horror of rape, since Mina's not under her own mental or physical control, the intermixing of agony and passion, plenty of blood, and sharp, pointy teeth. Stir, chill, and you have an everlasting archetype.

There ya go. Have a nice day not thinking about the phrase "bloody man-boob."

Awright. I'm going to be a bit less formal this time than I was with Frankenstein just because. So get used to it and hold on tight.

Dracula is a much better read than Mary Shelley's novel, but it still has big issues. I don't mean that it has multiple larger versions, though that is exactly what has happened by the passage of time as pop culture has produced its own versions of the events and characters in Bram Stoker's not-bedtime story. The movie by Francis Ford Coppola, also known as "Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula," was pretty good, better than most adaptations of the novel, but even that version has some serious additional material in the interest of making the story more palatable.

Stoker's novel begins with Jonathan Harker's trip to the Count's castle... Oh, before I forget to mention it, the whole story proceeds through diaries, newspaper clippings, transcribed phonograph recordings, and the like. It's ambitious writing, since it effectively describes events from at least five different points of view, but doesn't quite work out in most cases. Stoker presents every new entry with its source, putting a larger distance between the events and the reader: everything in the novel is someone's account of what they have already lived through. There's little actual thrill except for the beginning of the novel, where Jonathan encounters the Count and his castle, some of the entries by the Count's victims before they know what's going on, and near the end of the novel, where the chase is on and the entries become shorter and more active.

The middle of the story is a swampy morass of "How awful this Count fellow is, how fiendish, clever, and diabolical, but we have God on our side." Stoker draws out the knowledge of what it is that the characters are facing, pacing slowly but consistently, then when they absolutely know that they are facing something Un-Dead, unholy, and immortal, the plot just plain drags on. There's some activity, but it's merely slight punctuation to Stoker's slow drawing together of the band of hunters as they decide to chase down their evil quarry.

Dracula isn't bad, overall. The term "Un-Dead" arrives with a flourish in the novel, along with large amounts of vampire lore, to take hold in the collective Western unconscious. Stoker also presents the idea that resolute humans armed with knowledge, Sacred Wafers, crosses, garlic, Winchesters, knives, and other implements can change from prey to predator. The empowering concept of the vampire hunter is born.

Stoker also presents some very interesting characters that drive the story forward. Mina is a strong female character with "a mind trained like a man's" but still delicate and womanly. She deduces some of the Count's movements in the last quarter of the novel, pushing the story's action forward. Hers is the strong voice of strength in the face of despair. The other fascinating human character is Van Helsing, the man of science who is just nutty enough to believe, with empirical evidence to support it, in vampires. He suspects what is wrong with poor Lucy, but doesn't tell any of the other characters until they can see things for themselves. He knows that others will think him a lunatic if he doesn't have proof for them to back up his suspicions, but then he slams that evidence home with little remorse to recruit the others into following him to the Count's destruction.

And what of the Count? Dracula, lord of "the meaner creatures," able to shift his shape, to mesmerize from afar, and other such spiffy stuff, is a powerful being, but he doesn't have much in the way of personality in the novel. He's evil-looking, ancient, crafty, strong, and just wants to drink and hunt. In fact, Van Helsing says of the Count that he is very unusual, that he has risen above the rest of his kind's normal attention to only appetite. Dracula schemes of invading London to whet his whistle, so to speak, and when he encounters resistance, he goes after its weak points like a master strategist, then retreats to plot further when they thwart his goals enough. However, while he is no creature of appetite, he doesn't have good taste in furnishings. He probably has trouble finding housekeepers. The modern glamor attached to vampires does not spring from this story.

So if Coppola's movie was close to the novel, but the Count doesn't have much personality in Stoker's tale, where does the movie's major theme of eternal love come from? Shit if I know, but without it, the movie would be much less interesting. Gary Oldman wouldn't have been able to show his unbelievable acting mastery without it. However, as with many good modern vampire stories, the more human side of the immortal vampire comes to light in the movie. Instead of being driven primarily by the desire for good eats, in the movie Dracula's desire for Mina draws him to London. In both situations, it's a kind of passion that drives the Count to his actions, but blurring the line between human nature and the evil Un-Dead nature attracts more interest than a tale of a hungry, soulless monster. The movie works much better than the novel for giving our villain a better background story, and thus, more depth to the whole tale. It's a strange juxtaposition: In this case, the movie is better than the novel it's based on.

While the romantic subplot is nowhere to be found in Stoker's "evil thing comes, humans find out, get upset/angry, and hunt it down" story, there is a certain charm to it. It strikes a chord. Maybe the seed to the modern vampiric carnality is in Stoker's description of the Count's so-red lips and their contrast with his white, sharp teeth. The Count is cruel-looking, but not ugly, and his eyes smolder with an internal fire. Dracula's a bad boy archetype through and through, and the ladies, they like that.

Dracula is a classic tale of human triumph over the supernatural: the grandfather, if you will, of the modern Western vampire, having brought the vampire hunting group, the collation of vast amounts of vampire lore, and perhaps the description of the intimate process by which a human becomes one of the Un-Dead into the collective consciousness. I've enjoyed the story very much from a literary historical standpoint, noting where this story and modern vampire lore intersect and diverge, and it's a fairly fun read, too. Bon apetit.

I might just be safer because the Sony Personal Reader PRS-500 that I want hasn't yet been released. I allude to the massive Sony lithium-ion battery recalls, of course, knowing that the PRS-500 isn't going to use a lithium-ion battery, but couldn't help it. I am bitter about the availability delays. But I still want one.

Why do I want an eBook reader? Ah, I'm glad I asked that rhetorical question because it tailors so nicely into some actual commentary.

Reading text on a computer screen isn't as easy on the eyes as reading a regular ol' printed book. The display on the PRS-500 will look MUCH more like a printed page than a CRT or LCD. Reading text on a computer leaves you stuck in one place for a long time, too. Computers are generally not portable. PDAs and tablet PCs and laptops and other such devices get around this, but they were designed for other things, so either the displays aren't big enough or they're not as easy on the eyes as paper. LCD displays can also be difficult to read in bright light, like direct sunlight. Additionally, some of these devices take a while to boot up. I can't see sitting down on the toilet and waiting for a tablet PC to boot so I can read.

From what I've seen, the PRS-500 is going to have a persistent display. One of the more interesting features about it is that it only uses power when changing what is displayed, so it can be left on the same content for a long time without losing juice. This means that you can pick it up and unlike a book, you don't even have to find what page you were on to continue reading. It's also got a book-sized screen, and isn't as heavy as a laptop. Portable. No or very low boot time. Great readability in bright light. So far, so good.

One final thing really has me sold on this puppy, though, and that's the huge availability of textual content that has been made available over the Internet. I've cruised through Project Gutenberg and other Web locations to build up quite an eLibrary to plow through. The PRS-500 is supposed to understand a large number of unprotected text formats. Me likie. I want to read these books somewhere besides in front of my computer. I have a Love Sac that needs more attention. Mm hmm.

So, Sony, sorry to hear that you're getting pounded for battery issues and the Playstation 3 and other things, but PLEASE don't let this slow down your release of the PRS-500 further! Gimme gimme!

I have to increase my reading speed and comprehension to better get through this coming avalanche of reading material, though. I have a program I bought for this purpose, but it only runs on Windows, which means sitting in front of my PC to learn to read faster ... Is that not ironic?