So my tech-loving husband, of course, ordered an iPad just about the day that they were announced.  I never really got it- seemed like a hybrid between the iPhone and a laptop.  I’m still not totally sold, but I did get to play around with it today, specifically the iBooks app.

Here are my thoughts, laid out in a simple pros and cons list:

Pros

• The display is in color and it is seriously beautiful.  The book that comes on it automatically is Winnie-the-Pooh and it has all these color illustrations and they are stunning.  The words are crisp and clear.  It is simple to change the font to a larger or smaller font, depending on what you are comfortable with.  You can also change from a one page (vertical) display to a two page (horizontal) view just by flipping the iPad on its side.  You can lock that feature, however, so it doesn’t flip when you don’t want it to.
• The page-turning is smooth.  You can turn pages forward or backward by tapping the left or right side of the screen, depending on which way you want to flip.  You can also “pull” the page across by dragging your finger in the direction you want to turn for a more realistic looking page flip.
• There is a page count in the bottom left.  It even tells you how many pages until the end of the chapter you’re reading.  I loved this because I always try to make it to the end of a chapter before I quit, so it’s like a little countdown! I love that.  There is also a scrollbar at the bottom so you can quickly get back to a certain page or peek at the end if you’re that kind of person
• The iBook store has quite a selection of the books that are popular right now.  They have older titles too, but it takes a little more searching to find them.
• The library is set up so cute.  It has all the books lined up on these little “shelves” that you can organize however you like.
• You can get “samples” of each book in the iBook store.  I thought that this was really nice because a lot of times you can read the first chapter or a little chunk here and there.  For me, this is always more telling than the back of the book, so this sampling was pretty important to me.
• It’s backlit so reading in bed is nice.  It’s easy to make the page dimmer or brighter depending on what you like.
• I hear tell that the publishers can put movies and videos within the books, but I haven’t encountered that yet.
• All the Project Gutenberg books are on there for free. A lot of these are kind of “boring” books, but there are some goodies on there too.
• You can search, create bookmarks, highlight passages, look up words in the dictionary, all with one little easy click. Fun.

Cons

• For now, the iBook store is fairly limited.  I searched a few authors that were moderately popular and not all titles were there yet.  There are also not too many that have a description of the plot, like would be on the back cover.  There aren’t reviews or much info on any of the books yet, but I know that that will improve over time.
• My library has a ton of free e-books on their website. Seriously. A ton. They are in PDF format and you have to get them through the Overdrive program.  Overdrive and Macs are not friends at all, so none of these books load into the library in iBooks.  This was a serious disappointment for me.
• I am a cheapskate.  There are a lot of books on there under 10 bucks, but I get most of my books for free or for a buck or something.  Buying a real, new book is a big deal for me and coughing up money for an electronic book is even wilder for me. Most new releases are between 10 and 15 dollars. I saw a few that were more than that, but not many. For some this may be a Pro. For me it made the Con list. So there ya go. You also cannot share them between friends. I like to share. But I get it.
• I like to have a book with me at all times. I keep one in my purse all the time.  I’d be nervous to throw this in my purse.  I guess I could make some kind of little cover, or Shaun said that you can buy one for forty dollars, but if you refer back to the last bullet point, you’ll see why that’s an issue for me. I’m cheap.

So, here’s what I think so far: Very cool.  I am this reading purist, though, I think. I like the feel of a book in my hands and I like the smell of books and I like how they look on shelves.  If I were a commuter or a serious traveler or something I think I would be absolutely wild over it.  For now I really do think that it has tons of potential.  I’ve heard that textbook companies are releasing their text books in the iBook store and that would be incredible for college students. I would have killed for carrying around a pound and a half of iPad instead of 20 pounds of books.  I’m mega impressed and I’m excited to see where it goes.

The Book: The Girl Who Chased the Moon, by Sarah Addison Allen

The Story: After the death of her mother, Emily comes to the small town in North Carolina where her mother grew up to live with her Grandfather who happens to be a 8 foot tall giant.  The house that he lives in has mysterious changing wall paper and the woods outside are filled with strange lights. Right away, she starts to get the feel that her mom left on bad terms, although the reasons have everyone’s lips sealed.

Another newcomer to the town, Julia, came into town after her father died to take over his barbecue restaurant.  She starts baking cakes. Everyone is crazy about them.  She is Emily’s mother’s age and Emily and Julia become fast friends.  They help each other along as both of them deal with new relationships, friendships and parental issues.

What I Thought: I got this book on an ARC tour started by a book club friend, Cori. The book releases to the public on March 16th, so if it sounds good to you, get to your local bookstore on Tuesday to pick it up!

If you follow my blog at all, you’ll notice I’m not really a book snob, I read pretty much anything.  I tend to avoid chic lit, but I think it’s a good diversion from time to time.  That’s exactly what this book was. A good, quick diversion.

The only real issue that I had was totally unrealistic dialogue.  The conversations between Emily and Win, who were supposed to be 17, were especially cringe-worthy.  This really is something that I’m a stickler about, so maybe I was too hard on the author, but I found it just totally choppy and strange.

Other than that, I thought that this was an easy-to-read, heartwarming little story.  Like in any chic lit, especially Southern chic lit, the characters and the setting were pretty over-the-top and overdone, and the plot was pretty easy to predict…but sometimes this kind of “light read” is called for.

Crystal had this book before me in the ARC tour, and here is her review.

Conclusion: Just a good, easy read.  Not great, not awful.  Worth the few hours it will take you to read it.

The Book: Freakonomics; A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

The Story: Yeah, not much of a “story.”  They even say in the introduction that the information presented doesn’t really have particularly clear ties to any of the other information.  Each chapter kind of takes on a life of its own and has little do to with the chapters before and after. So, moving on.

The idea behind this book is using concrete data to explore things that most people would never think to explore.  One chapter, about cheating, talks about No Child Left Behind and how that has lead to increased cheating, by teachers, on the yearly standardized tests.  The author took the data from Chicago city school and lined up the answers to try to find information that pointed to cheaters.  The other half of this chapter was about how sumo wrestling in Japan seems to be rigged and provided a lot of data on that.

Most of the book seemed to focus on different crime-related issues.  There was a chapter on drug dealers and how much money they make, a correlation between the legalization of abortion and a drop in crime around 15 years later, the ku klux klan, and sneaky real estate agents.

The last two chapters were on parenting.  The first one was about what makes a “good parent.” The next one was about names and how they effect the kid’s life.

I bought this book recently so the copy that I have has a lot of “bonus material” in the back- mostly interviews and articles from other papers.  I have to admit that I just skimmed most of this, so I’m not sure what it was all about.

What I Thought: I really like charts and graphs and numbers, so long as someone else is putting them together.  I know that this is the nerd in me coming out, but that’s always my favorite part of USA Today, how they have fun little graphs on the front of each section.

So this book was pretty much one huge USA Today graph for me.  Just strange data compounded to make pretty interesting points.  My favorite chapter was the first one.  The information on the Chicago teachers cheating on the standardized testing was totally fascinating to me.  Political views aside, my younger brother fell victim to the “no time to teach, we have to test” mentality and really fell behind in school.  I knew that that attitude was fall-out from No Child Left Behind, but I never considered that teachers would straight up change kids’ answers. Totally fascinating.

The other part that really made an impact on me was the part about parenting.  We are getting ready to become parents so we’ve been doing a lot of reading.  There are so many “theories” out there on what makes a good parent, a good kid, a functional family.  It was nice here to see some data to go with what they were saying.  The chapter on names was pretty incredible too.  I had never really thought about the “trickle down” effect of names, that higher income families use them then they end up with the middle class and then the lower classes. Makes sense, but I’d never thought about it.  Well, lower class, get ready for an influx of babies named Aiden any time.  The middle class HAS to be about done with it, right?

If I could find a real “fault” in the book, it is that it is total information overload.  I was in love with the book and wanted to learn more so I kind of raced through it.  By the end, I had a hard time describing it to my husband because I had too many facts and figured going through my head.  But is that really a fault? Probably not.  I really loved this book.

I saw at the book store that there is a follow up book now, but I’m a big time cheapskate so I probably won’t get that for a few years, when I can find it at the thrift store.  I paid full price for this (via gift card) and it was a huge deal in my house.  Going to the bookstore to BUY something? Novel idea! Pun intended.

The Book: World Without End, by Ken Follett

The Story: Not entirely sure where to start with this one.  This is the companion to Pillars of the Earth, which was another giant of a book.  Really the similarities end at the fact that they take place in the same town, Kingsbridge.  There were a few references to the characters from the first book, but I think that it was just to appease readers, they really had no relevance to the story.

In this one, we’re looking at England in the 1300’s.  The books starts with a scene featuring four kids: Merthin, his younger brother Ralph, Caris, and Gwenda.  They witness/are involved in the murder of two of the king’s men who were after this knight, Thomas.  Thomas is taken to the hospital at the monastery and he becomes a monk.  This moment becomes kind of a diving off point in the lives of these five characters, and their stories are what make up this mammoth of a book.

This is a big book. Typing up a summary is proving difficult because so much happened.  Mostly we’re looking at knights, and earls, and murder and deceit.  There’s also thieving monks, crazy ailment cures, people being sold, and a lot of fights.  There are building projects and a new way to dye cloth, and two witch trials.  There are three hospitals, lots of infections, and thousands of plague related deaths.  Then there is the sex.  Gay knight sex, steamy lesbian nun sex, several rapes, sex in the cathedral, sex in the woods, sex in public and more boob fondling than I can even record here.  All this sex leads to kids.  Bastard kids, kids raised by the wrong dads, all kinds of good stuff.

What I Thought: I like a character driven book.  There’s nothing better, for me, than a well written character.  For that, I loved this book. I felt like the main characters were fleshed out beautifully and by the end of the book, it was hard for me to remember that they were not real people.  I especially loved Caris and I found myself fighting for her in my head.  That internal struggle that she had throughout most of the book was written so perfectly and it made it easy to empathize with her.

In the same way, the “bad guys” were written in such a way that I could feel my blood pressure rise during parts about them.  Between Ralph and Godwyn, I could literally feel my anger spiking.  That really is nothing but good writing. Overall, I felt like the “bad guys” were kind of flat and didn’t really seem to change, but somehow it worked.

That being said, this book could have been about 500 pages shorter and still been really good.  The “oh, the plague is gone. Nope, it’s back. And gone again. One more case. Make that a hundred. Gone for good….” on and on and on made me want to chuck the book out the window.  The same with the conflicts with Godwyn, the prior.  I understood that he was a horrible man with bad intentions after the fifth example.  I don’t need ten more examples.  For me, parts of this felt like Ken Follett just wanted to write another long book.  And that his editor let him.

The sex was totally gratuitous, and again, about a fifth of it could have been left out and the reader could have gotten a clear picture of what was going on.  Merthin and Caris are lovers.  Look at them have sex in the woods. And in the church. And in the house. And in the…. ok. Got it. You know?

And this is all strange coming from me. I love a giant book.  My short list of favorite books are almost all books that hover around 1000 pages.  But I don’t like length just for the sake of length.  This was repetitious and tedious at parts. I just wanted to take my red pen to this book and save future readers some trouble.

Conclusion: If you have a lot of time on your hands, by all means read this.  The characters and the setting are really great.  But brace yourself for a lot of tedious fight scenes and over-the-top sex scenes.

In addition, I can’t wait to see what search terms get people to my blog after this entry. “Steamy Lesbian Nun Sex”. You can get it all here at Lovely Little Shelf! Ha.