E-book versions of Mary Roachs’ Packing for Mars and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger

And dead tree books (DTB) of Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (NYRB-yummo!), A Novel Bookstore by Lawrence Cosse (Europa Editions-woo!), One Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell and Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature by Emma Donoghue, which should be excellent material for my novel.

I’ve also signed up for NetGalley, a repository for advance reader’s editions (ARCs) in order to review them for here, BookBalloon, Visual Bookshelf on Facebook and reviews on Amazon. Hopefully I’ll be approved. Cross your fingers for me, as I would love to do that.

I haven’t even received Annabelle* yet and I already have a peeve-storage capacity. It only holds 3GB of books (it says 4GB but the software apparently occupies 1GB, a rant for later), which for someone with a lot of PDFed books this isn’t much space, and it doesn’t take an SDHC card. Dammit, people, I want to be able to carry all 7,ooo of my e-books around. I can only hope that Kindle 4 will have some monster space on. I wouldn’t mind paying more for the storage.

*My new Kindle. I name all electronic devices because it’s easier to swear at something with a name.

I’m getting a Kindle 3. It’s currently out of stock and will ship ‘on or before September 20’ so I’ve been reading the Kindle Support Pages in preparation. I’ve also joined the KindleKorner Yahoo group, which has already answered many of my questions.

I’m very much looking forward to trying it out with an e-book I’ve already bought, Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger , whose title puts me in mind of Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend .

I quite liked The Little Friend, though I see it only has two and a half stars on Amazon. This is puzzling because it’s incredibly well-written. There’s a rather important plot issue near the beginning, but if one chose to over look that then it was a great read. And it accomplished something that’s rare in fiction of any sort (including films) which is that it perfectly captures backwoods, white trash culture. It’s worth it for that alone.