Reading on my new Nook: The White Company

I bought a Nook e-reader about a week ago, and I just finished reading the first book I bought in eBook format: Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company (I had previously read a PDF of John Scalzi's novella The God Engines on my daughter's Nook, but that was much shorter and was a PDF and not a format actually designed to be read on a device like the Nook, so it didn't really provide as good a view of what reading on the Nook is like.

I really liked the experience. Reading on the Nook feels in many ways very similar to reading a real book. The form factor is similar. The way you hold it is similar -- even more so if like me you buy a cover for the Nook that flips open like a book. Navigation is similar, with a simple button on the side for paging forward or back. You can also set bookmarks to allow you to jump to a previously marked spot, and many books come with tables of contents that allow you to navigate to predefined locations. There is also a search capability, though I haven't yet used that. (I also haven't used the ability to add notes or to highlight text.) Even nicer, the Nook, while heavy enough and large enough to feel "real" (unlike, say, a smart phone), it's light enough so that no book can make your arm feel tired after a while.

In summary, I'd give a very solid recommendation to the Nook for reading many types of books. What won't work on a Nook? I'm not planning on buying major history books, since many good ones include lots maps, which are best viewed as you read. I'm currently reading the Landmark Herodotus, which features hundreds of maps, and I'm often reading with fingers marking one or more maps that I keep looking back and forth at as I read. This wouldn't work nearly as well on a Nook. Likewise, I doubt most textbooks would work well, again because it's more difficult to do frequent flipping back and forth to multiple locations.

I've said what the Nook has, but I haven't said what I think it's missing. The two big things I've run into so far is the ability to organize your library better. The current "by author, by title, by date" views are fine if you have a dozen books, but will be a pain when I have hundreds. And for navigating withing a book, it really needs a "go to page" feature, where you can specify a page number.

As for The White Company, it's a good historical novel by Doyle. It's set during the Hundred Years War between England and France, and follows Alleyne, a young man who grew up in a monastery but now finds himself out in the world. He connects with two men -- another outcast from the monastery and an archer, back from the wars to recruit Sir Nigel Loring to return to lead the White Company. They meet Sir Nigel, Alleyne falls in love with Nigel's daughter, and they (the men, not the daughter) head off to war. All along the way, they have adventures, tangling with pirates, rescuing a young woman and her father from thieves, jousting with mysterious knights, and so on. It's all great fun.

The character of Nigel sometimes seems like a cross between Don Quixote and the characters in those romances of chivalry that Cervantes was responding too. He is over gentle and over mannered to a fault, at one point even urging the Black Prince to put him to death rather than going back on his oath to hang the man who was Captain of the White Company. At his extreme, he can be exasperating, but the great cast of characters around him makes up for that.

It all concludes in a major battle, with the White Company pitted against a much larger Spanish army. Nigel's chivalry frankly gets many killed and almost gets the main characters killed, but it does give Alleyne a chance to distinguish himself. That, coupled with the timely news that his nasty, cowardly brother in England has been killed and that Alleyne is no longer landless, means that he can wed Nigel's daughter. Which of course he does on returning to England, arriving just in time to save her from going to a nunnery.

Again, great fun if a bit implausible. The ebooks also includes Doyle's other novel about Sir Nigel (Sir Nigel), which I hope to read sometime in the next few weeks.

The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A.E. van Vogt

About a dozen years ago, I reread a number of works of A.E. van Vogt and concluded that, while van Vogt was not very good at the novel level (re-reading The World of Null-A resulted in my agreeing with Damon Knight’s dismantling of it), he had written a number of still powerful short stories. The latest version of The New York Review of Science Fiction featured a long article by Joe Milicia on The Voyage of the Space Beagle, so I decided to re-read it.

The Voyage of the Space Beagle was originally published as four shorter works in Astounding and later turned into a fix-up novel by van Vogt, who added material to tie things together a bit more. It involves the voyages of the interstellar -- and eventually intergalactic -- exploratory ship the Space Beagle as it encounters for different alien beings or races, each of which becomes a threat to the ship that must be solved. Van Vogt is at his best during the encounters with the aliens that made up the original short stories. The aliens are memorable and often alien, and the crew has to come up with ways to defeat incredible threats. The two most memorable are “The Black Destroyer” and “Discord in Scarlet.” The former features a large cat like being (Coeurl) that is incredibly strong, can control magnetic fields, is very smart, and wants to kill and consume the crew. (It actually wants to consume what it thinks of as “id” which has no relationship that I can see to the Freudian term but really seems to mean life force or potassium, which somehow van Vogt combines. Science is not van Vogt’s strong point.) In the latter, the encounter an Ixtl, another super-powered alien, the sole survivor apparently from the dominant civilization of the previous cycle of the universe, that can walk through walls, is extremely intelligent, and wants to capture the crew so it can lay eggs in them, eventually to repopulate the universe with its kind. Both stories are great examples of the better type of pulp adventure of the early Campbell Astounding.

The novel is at its worst though in what van Vogt added to turn it into a novel. First off, we have many scenes of the scientists squabbling over which department should run the ship, with some ignoring the best solutions to problems for political reasons and sometimes resorting to outright thuggish behavior. Then we have the main character Grosvenor, the “Nexialist.” Van Vogt was fond of jumping on the bandwagons of various psychological theories, ranging from dianetics to general semantics. Nexisalism is the hobby horse of this novel. At first, a Nexialist is described as sort of a scientific inter disciplinarian, someone who can take what the specialists of various fields are doing and come to conclusions they might miss. But van Vogt doesn’t stop there. He manages to combine this with hypnotism and mind-control, making Grosvenor into a superman of sorts. It’s all rather silly and detracts from the more interesting parts of the novel.

In the end, The Voyage of the Space Beagle is worth reading for what’s good about it -- the very enjoyable short stories buried within -- but marred by the types of issues that effect a number of van Vogt’s longer works.

Wake by Robert Sawyer

I continued my Hugo reading with WWW: Wake by Robert Sawyer. Sawyer typically does a good job of combining realistic and interesting characters with generally thrilling concepts, and Wake is no exception.

Caitlin a teenage math genius who was born blind. Her eyes work, but the signal is garbled on its way to her brain. A research scientist in Japan develops a possible solution: essentially an external signal processor that transforms the signal between retina and brain. The device -- which Caitlin calls her eyePod -- eventually works, but has a side effect. In one of its modes, it enables her to literally see the World Wide Web, which appears to her as geometric shapes connected by lines.

But in viewing the Web, Caitlin sees something else. There is an information-containing process in the background, a cellular automata. Information theory confirms that what she is seeing isn’t just noise, and it first she and those around her assume that it’s perhaps an NSA monitoring process. But it isn’t: an intelligence has developed in the Web’s information systems. She sees it, and it, following the info feed from Caitlin’s eyePod, sees her.

Sawyer does a very good job of showing how a Web entity -- which Caitlin comes to think of as the Phantom, based on a term Hellen Keller used to describe her own pre-aware state -- as bit by bit it becomes aware of itself and its surroundings. At first, it has no idea what the data all around it is. It “sees” ones and zeroes but has no idea what they mean. But by watching Caitlin and her attempts to teach herself to read after she gains sight, it begins to understand. And what Caitlin realizes what she’s dealing with -- an intelligence, not just background noise or an NSA process -- she helps it along, taking an active role in teaching it.

Equally well done is Sawyer’s portrayal of Caitlin, both as a person who has never been able to see and as a person who suddenly can see. He is very detailed in both parts. For example, when Caitlin gains her sight, she can’t read. Of course she’s been reading braille for years, and is a wiz on the Web, with a blog (under the name Calculass), and can write. But she has never seen letters, let alone words, so she must learn, but by bit, starting with “A is for apple” style primers. It’s watching her do this that helps the Phantom understand what the data streams are, as it relates the ASCII bit pattern for “A” with the picture of the apple.

Unfortunately from a Hugo voter’s perspective, the book isn’t complete. It’s really the first third of a longer novel. The major plot line at least comes to a reasonable pause point, but subplots are only partially developed. An interesting side story about a chimp that begins to paint in a representational fashion -- clearly a step toward awareness, in parallel with the main story -- isn’t really tied in and the last part of it we see in this book is a cliff hanger of sorts. I’m sure Sawyer will tie it in more strongly in the next two volumes, but form the perspective of just this book -- which is after all what I need to vote on for my Hugo ballot -- it’s incomplete.

So, even though I enjoyed Wake and plan to buy the next volume, it will be behind several other novels on my ballot.