Back From the Grave...With a Nook!

The author, buried under the ton of Christmas books he received this year.

I'm back!!!

One of the many lessons learned during my forced sabbatical from blogging (lest you think I only shunned you, my personal blog saw less action than myself as a teenager) is that trying to shift into a new job AND put a new roof on your house AND host the holidays for the first time AND wrangle a two and a half year old that's sick AND not get sick yourself is, in a word, impossible.

At least impossible to do and still blog.

But the holidays are over, my son's feeling better, the roof is more or less on, and my new job, while still way more intense than anything I've done before, is at least slowing down enough so that I can go home and not have nightmares about all the things I screwed up or forgot during the day. Which means I can start to get to the business of reading and writing and sharing in all the joy with the wonderful Un:Bound community.

Uh, that's you folks.

Okay, let's talk some books. Lots given, lots received. The quick list of booty obtained this year: Zappa, the Frank Zappa biography by Barry Miles; Kurt Vonnegut's memoir Man Without a Country; The Cat's Pajamas, a collection of short stories from James Morrow; David Eggers' novel adaptation of his screenplay for WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, simply called Wild Things; Michael Chabon's memoir/essay collection Manhood for Amateurs; and a number of graphic novels, including Omega the Unknown written by Jonathan Lethem and the third gorgeous Library Edition of the collected Hellboy.

But the real prize didn't arrive until New Year's Eve. That's right: I finally broke down and decided to try out the whole eReader thing. The physical volume of books in my house is starting to get a bit much, and I'd been feeling the need to de-clutter my life for some time now. So the idea of moving digital for novels I'd read once and ditch as well as having a handy place for some of my favorites seemed like a great idea. A few intense husband/wife negotiations later and I was holding the latest eReader in my hands: the nook from Barnes & Noble:

There are a number of reasons I went nook over the Kindle and the Sony eReader, the biggest being the freedom to download ebooks from places other than B&N and the sleek, Apple-ish design. The big flaw so far? Turns out (surprise surprise) I'm a bit of an impulse buyer, and the ability to get pretty much whatever I want at the touch of a button? Well, $200 later I decided I needed to slow down before we lost the house...

I'll save my review for the big smackdown going down later this week, but the short version is I got used to the format much quicker than I expected.

That's all for now. I read a lot of books during my leave, including a fair number of science fiction and fantasy, so plenty to write about in the coming days. Hope everyone out there in Un:Bound land had a great new year - here's hoping 2010 turns out to be a winner!