As you can well imagine, my Christmas was filled with books. I set aside Absalom, Absalom! to pick up Pillars of the Earth but will soon return again to the comfortable and bizarre world of William Faulkner. I have Michael Dirda's The Classics for Pleasure which I will get to soon.
In addition, I used Christmas gifts to go out and buy books I would never consider getting for myself. So I ended up with The Landmark Herodotus which will sit alongside my Landmark Thucydides. I much prefer Herodotus to Thucydides as "fun reading"; however these editions make for fun and informative reading of either resource.
Also picked up The Undercover Economist who has a great deal to tell us about markets, economics, and how to buy coffee or groceries. Right now I'm reading a fascinating chapter about the auctioning of the electromagnetic spectrum as it relates to game theory.
Do you have a Kindle/Sony reader? I'd like to hear your opinion of them; I saw a Sony reader at the bookstore last week, but I wasn't so impressed that I thought it was worth trying to convince my wife that I needed one.
Dear Brandon,
I'm never in the line of first adopters. I'm going to wait for the second generation that may make certain aspects of the machine a little better and may allow for better import, etc.
However, having looked at a great many of these things I am indeed impressed by it and I think this may be the breakthrough product that e-Books have been waiting for. It even received something of a rave from Publisher's Weekly Editor--so it does seem to be in the neighborhood, at least.
Waiting until the second generation was pretty much my wife's opinion, and I agree. Especially because the demo model of the Sony was a bit slow to respond to the button presses, including for the page turns. But I really liked the look of the electronic ink display method, and I agree that this seems to be a breakthrough for e-text.