What a relief finally to hear the truth spoken aloud! Ever since I was a little boy and saw the girl across the street reading One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, I’ve known that I couldn’t respect a woman with a taste for rhyme. As life went on, I learned that reading poetry in general was a sure sign of an underlying character flaw and a tendency never to pick up the check in expensive restaurants. Readers of epics, I have learned, expect heroics in bed, so no dark-eyed readers of blank verse for me! Plays imply a talkative streak which no man can abide. (Except Corneille. But let’s not quarrel, my love.) To readers of memoirs I say simply, “Get a life!” And on my therapist’s orders, I cannot have a biography in the house. (Performance anxiety. Inevitable death. You understand.)

This is a recollection of his time at University College Dublin in the 1940s:

I was alert to the fact that there were a few cult books that we expected one another to know by heart, including At Swim-Two-Birds and Three Men in a Boat.

Citations from these took the place of conventional greetings. Precocious students would call to each other across a crowded Grafton Street: “Thou hast committed fornication”; and a loud reply was supposed to come: “But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.” Not that we had read The Jew of Malta, the source of that exchange — we had read Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, but not The Jew — but we knew that bit of dialogue because T.S. Eliot had used it as an epigraph to his Portrait of a Lady. Adepts of insult would regularly intone to a friend: “Thou hast nor youth nor age, but as it were an after dinner sleep, dreaming of both” — again one of Eliot’s epigraphs, this one from his poem “Gerontion.”

So far I’ve read 1½ books on the Cybook and I have to say it makes for very comfortable reading indeed, I haven’t experienced any sort of eyestrain whatsoever: the screen isn’t really white, but more grayish in colour (like a newspaper) and the resulting contrast between the black letters and gray background is rather nice. Still, as a first-time e-book reader I found it somewhat strange to read without being able to feel how I’m progressing through the book.

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TechCrunch examines the Chinese and Australian way:

The Australian Government has announced that they will be joining China as one of the few countries globally that broadly censor the internet.

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America’s Business Week has an interesting article by Candice Choi on the print-on-demand industry:

On-demand publisher Lulu.com has churned out 236,000 paperbacks since it opened in 2002, and its volume of new paperbacks has risen each month this year, hitting 14,745 in November.

What this writer has done over a series of novels is build a fictional world, Rocksburg, in western Pennsylvania’s coal mining district. Police Chief Mario Balzic, his wife Ruth, his mother who lives with them, Blazic’s colleagues and the people who work at City Hall, and the various criminals and witnesses to their crimes, the waitresses in the restaurants and the guys who serve behind the bars are the characters who inhabit the neighbourhood and the novels.

Constantine has an ear for dialogue that is as good as George V Higgins or Elmore Leonard, and he has the capacity to breathe life into his characters that is more convincing than either. Balzic, himself often the main protagonist in the early novels, is satisfyingly conflicted and convincing and must be one of the most engaging characters in today’s crime fiction scene in Europe or America.

In Joey’s Case:

Balzic had been trying to dodge Albert Castelucci for five months. There were only so many things he could say to a man whose only son had been shot to death, and he had long since said them all. He had apologized, sympathized, commiserated; he had explained again and again that it had not happened in his jurisdiction. It had happened in Westfield Township, only a matter of yards away from the Rocksburg border, it was true, but yards were yards and borders were borders. Balzic knew he was in trouble when he began protesting that he had been in Pittsburg when it happened, as if that mattered. The more he ducked the old man, the more the old man hounded him; the more he explained, the less the old man heard, or even pretended to hear. In no time, Balzic’s sympathy and commiseration had turned to irritation and then to frustration and then to anger; and then, one Sunday after Castelucci had confronted him after Mass in front of St. Malachy’s, Balzic heard himself saying, “Mr Castelucci, as far as your son was concerned, it was only a matter of time.”

Needless to say, Balzic eventually agrees to dabble around in someone else’s jurisdiction, gets himself sucked into something that almost amounts to a full-time job while he’s also administering his Rocksburg responsibilities, coping with absentee officers in his own force, and battling a severe case of sexual dysfunction.

But it’s not the first time Mario has been threatened by an overwhelming and hostile environment, and in this 1988 novel, he’s dealing every card in the pack to get Rocksburg back into some kind of order.

If you don’t know Constantine’s work, it’s worth trying to track one of these novels down. It could be exactly what you need to slip seamlessly into 2008.

All titles are free to download and install on your phone. You can browse the available books by Author or Title; or you can pull up lists of classics through their classification: Adventure, Biography, Memoir, Comedy, Satire, Fantasy, Historical, Fiction, Mystery, Horror, Mythology, Non Fiction, Philosophy, Political, Romance, SciFi, Short Works, or Miscellaneous.

Once on your phone you can choose the size of font and easily page forwards or backwards, skip from one chapter to another, choose day or night mode to discover which is easiest on your eyes, and when you’re ready to quit, the program bookmarks the page you last read. If you have an incoming call while reading, the text will be paused so you can answer the call, and when you hang up the text will automatically appear again so you can carry on reading.

The Contemporary Works section only contained one author I’d heard of, but the classics section was overflowing with Dickens, Ibsen, Wollstonecraft, Tolstoy, Twain, Nietsche, Gaskell, Kant, Austen and Robert Louis Stevenson, to name but a few.

Almost all of the books are out of copyright. But the site only allows you to download those that are free of copyright in your area of the world.

You can download to your computer and then transfer the texts to your phone, or, if your mobile can browse the internet you can download directly to the phone. Cranford, literally, took me a couple of minutes to download and install.

Oh, and the Help department came back swiftly to my plea for a couple of minor problems I had. While I shall not use the system extensively because of the smallness of the mobile’s screen, it does represent a useful resource. I expect to use it when travelling short distances and at those unexpected moments when I find myself alone with coffee.

How did I learn to read? I really don’t know how to answer that. It’s a mystery! Suddenly, there I was, reading. I started going to school just after I turned seven. I was always a good student. I completed primary school in Garanhuns; then, we moved to Alagoas. I studied a little bit there, then completed school here in São Paulo. It was a small house with mud walls, and my teacher was called Maria Lourenço. We lived out in the country, it’s hard to describe. But I can see it now, my school: I can see me sitting there in the class with my friends. I can also see my first pair of shoes, given to me when I was 7. It was black… it’s a pity that I couldn’t study all my life, especially when we lived in the Northeast. There weren’t enough schools or resources.
Inácio Pereira Rangel, 1934, Joiner, Garanhuns, PE.

This was culled from an entry in the (Brazilian) Museum of the Person, a wonderful site which is packed with gems.