The iPod Touch

Wheee....! In recent weeks I downloaded 109 free podcasts from iTunes. Those are mostly authors discussing their books such as: Alice Walker, Garrison Keillor, Geraldine Brooks, and Carol Shields. When purchasing the ipod Touch, I really wasn’t sure that I would use it as much as I have. I’m over the moon with it. I’m glad now, I lashed out the cash for one with 32GB. The New Yorker short stories are a feast. Well, every podcast I have is a feast. I also have audio books in the ipod. Last night I listened to some of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone stories. He has a delightful humour and a lovely warm voice.

I don’t think audio books will take over from printed, anymore than those in devices like the Kindle are likely to. Carol Shields, who won the Pulitzer for The Stone Dairies, made this comment some years ago: “Twenty five years from now I predict a rediscovery of the book as we know it. Suddenly people will be saying of books: how portable, how compact, how direct, how cost-effective, how intimate, how blessedly silent, how vivid, how enduring, how interactive, how revolutionary! Quote from the Vancouver Village.

I’m currently dipping into My Mistress Sparrow Is Dead: Love Stories from Chekov to Munro, edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov has turned out to be a delightful surprise, particularly, as many years ago I read and loathed Lolita. I never rated that novel as worthy of the many accolades that it had. It's not the quality of Nabokov's writing that I have issues with. It's the objectification of Lolita and her seduction, which justifies rape.

There are many, many, writers work I enjoy immensely. One such is Sue Monk Kidd, her Dance of the Dissident Daughter is a memoir I cherish. I loved reading her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees. This UTube video is superb. SMK is an excellent speaker and she doesn’t aggravatingly um, eh or ah, to any extent. People do that when nervous, it is very distracting if it’s excessive. Mostly, she discusses her more recent novel The Mermaid Chair.