16 Apr Cutting for Stone on the Kindle
The Story of Cutting for Stone from abrahamverghese.com
The story is a riveting saga of twin brothers, Marion and Shiva Stone, born of a tragic union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, and bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.But it’s love, not politics — their passion for the same woman — that will tear them apart and force Marion to flee his homeland and make his way to America, finding refuge in his work at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him, wreaking havoc and destruction, Marion has to entrust his life to the two men he has trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.
So I’m well into our new novel, Cutting for Stone, but I can’t tell you what page I’m on and I’ll have to fire up the Kindle to remind myself what chapter! Yes, this blogger has been bitten by the Kindle bug. Sort of.
I confess, I’m no techie, but I try. I make a relatively honest effort at staying on top of what’s up, largely thanks to my teenage kids. I blog. I have a website. I’m on Twitter. True, I have yet to enter the world of Pinterest, but on my way back from five wonderful days spent working and dining with my husband in Toronto, I have officially entered the world of the e-reader.
Ready to make a desperate dash to the only book retailer open the night before our morning flight (think of all the reading I could do in airports, on planes, in coffee shops–without kids), my husband brilliantly suggested, “Why don’t you see if it’s available on the Kindle?”
Here’s the embarrassing part: said Kindle has been in our house for a year. My husband has read a couple of books on it; my 14-year old daughter a dozen. It took the deep desire to get that book before we left combined with an equally deep loathing to drive down to Chapters, to give this gadget a go.
So far, here’s what I LOVE
1) LOVE how quickly you have a book in your hands…and how cheaply! Gotta’ love the digital dollars, although, that said…I still think the $12.99 I paid is a bit steep for digital copy, especially when my husband, intrigued by the promising content of our current book (and determined to show me up by reading the book twice as fast as me), ordered it up on his i-pad for $9.99.
2) LOVE how light weight it is, how long the battery lasts, the little light that pops out of the top, though once again, this last features was outdone by the i-pad. The backlit screen can’t be beat.
3)LOVE that I could pop it in my purse, that you can put so many books on one little unit, that you have a book on demand (provided it’s available digitally).
So far, here’s what’s BUGGING me
1) It BUGS me that I keep loosing my place. True, I’m a restless soul in more ways than one, including that I can’t sit still. I’m a wriggler and that goes for when I read. I can’t tell you how many times I hit the forward or backward page button and found myself on a new page and since the pages aren’t numbered…which really BUGS me, more than once I had to scroll through several pages to find my place.
2) I miss the cover. That BUGS me. I miss the book feel in my hands and manually being able to flip back and forth between pages. Again, the i-pad has a much more authentic page feel (screen displays two side-by-side pages and you “flip” the corner to turn them).
3) I want to put stickies on pages I plan to blog about but instead I must make digital notes and sometimes that seems to work well (it’s certainly easier to read my own comments); other times I scroll down and hit the wrong command and end up somewhere else, which BUGS me and then I madly try to get back to where I want to be and end up flipping pages and I’m lost and that really BUGS me.
But I am determined to stick with it, give myself time to adjust to the 21st century. I know I’ll get it figured out and I already see the benefit, but I do love books…old-fashioned books with dog-eared pages and coffee stains down their pages and pink sticky notes stuck out the sides and wrinkled covers that tell a tale before I even flip–manually–to the first page.