All is quiet on New Year's Day.

[Swish]

We got about 4 or 5 inches of white, powdery snow yesterday morning, following by icy rain last night. I arose about 5:30 AM, picked up my wife's Kindle and started reading 'Lamb' by Christopher Moore, who is rapidly becoming my favorite author, although I don't read nearly as much as I should.

I'll be settling in with some tunes in a bit, probably playing some of the tasty comps I recently downloaded from Slosh and noddinOff. At 1 PM my plasma will to tuned into the Penn State/LSU game, followed by more college football until bedtime.

How about you? Big plans for 1/1/10?

[ForeverAutumn]

You were up at 5:30?

We had some friends over last night and were up pretty late, so I just rolled out of bed around 9:00 this morning. And the only reason that I'm up this early is a couple of hungry cats who insisted that I get up to feed them.

I have a kitchen full of dishes and party remnants that I guess I'll have to go clean up soon (or wait until Hubby gets up and let him do it )).

Otherwise, I think it'll be a nice quiet day reading Barbara Walters memoirs and maybe start watching the first season of Rescue Me on DVD (a christmas gift from Hubby) later this afternoon.

There's a light snow happening here now and bunch of birds at our bird feeder. It's all very peaceful and quiet. A very nice way to kick off 2010.

[Hyfi]

Having mom over for dinner and ale while we watch the Flyers play Boston outside in the Winter Classic and then switch to the String Bands to round out the day.

Mad Elf and St Bernardus will be flowing in generous amounts!

Happy New Years all!

[Swish]

Having mom over for dinner and ale while we watch the Flyers play Boston outside in the Winter Classic and then switch to the String Bands to round out the day.

Mad Elf and St Bernardus will be flowing in generous amounts!

Happy New Years all!

Not only is it 12% ABV, I think it tastes odd, and no wonder. It's made with cherries, honey, and chocolate malt. If you like it, I suppose there's not much I can do, but please don't get your mom hooked on that crap!

I'll be taking a peek at the Flyers during commercial breaks of the Penn State game. I sure hope than can win yet another to make it 5 in a row after that awful stretch. Beating the Rangers 6-0 was a hoot.

Enjoy!
Swishdaddy

[Troy]

Christopher Moore became my favorite writer a few years ago when I read his hilarious and truly surreal "Island of the Sequined Love Nun" while sitting on a beach in Hawaii. "Lamb" was the one that left me flat because I think i missed all the inside jokes, not being educated in biblical matters, but I gave it to a friend that was a theology major who proclaimed it the funniest book he'd ever read, so there you go. The contemporary vampire story "Blood Sucking Fiends" and truly bizarre undersea sci-fi "Fluke" are my favorites. Unfortunately, I think I've already read everything he wrote.

It's cold, rainy and dark today. I'm in serious hibernation mode.

[Swish]

Christopher Moore became my favorite writer a few years ago when I read his hilarious and truly surreal "Island of the Sequined Love Nun" while sitting on a beach in Hawaii. "Lamb" was the one that left me flat because I think i missed all the inside jokes, not being educated in biblical matters, but I gave it to a friend that was a theology major who proclaimed it the funniest book he'd ever read, so there you go. The contemporary vampire story "Blood Sucking Fiends" and truly bizarre undersea sci-fi "Fluke" are my favorites. Unfortunately, I think I've already read everything he wrote.

It's cold, rainy and dark today. I'm in serious hibernation mode.

I read that on the beach in Mexico and was laughing so hard my wife told me I needed to quiet down. I also liked 'You Suck, A Love Story' nearly as much. I believe that's the sequel to B.S.F. actually, so I guess I'm going to have to read that one too, along with Fluke. Problem I have now is I bought my wife a Kindle and she won't be buying actual books any longer, so I'll have to wait until she takes a break so I can use it. What a great invention it is though.

[ForeverAutumn]

I read that on the beach in Mexico and was laughing so hard my wife told me I needed to quiet down. I also liked 'You Suck, A Love Story' nearly as much. I believe that's the sequel to B.S.F. actually, so I guess I'm going to have to read that one too, along with Fluke. Problem I have now is I bought my wife a Kindle and she won't be buying actual books any longer, so I'll have to wait until she takes a break so I can use it. What a great invention it is though.

This sounds like an author that Hubby might like. I'll check it out. Hubby has a birthday coming up. Thanks for the tip.

So is this Kindle thing good? I've heard about them but never seen one. Is the screen big enough for easy reading?

[Slosh]

Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town.

A sign announced that this was no ordinary footpath but the celebrated Appalachian Trail. Running more than 2,100 miles along America's eastern seaboard, through the serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes. From Georgia to Maine, it wanders across fourteen states, through plump, comely hills whose very names -- Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands, Green Mountains, White Mountains -- seem an invitation to amble. Who could say the words "Great Smoky Mountains" or "Shenandoah Valley" and not feel an urge, as the naturalist John Muir once put it, to "throw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack and jump over the back fence"?

And here it was, quite unexpectedly, meandering in a dangerously beguiling fashion through the pleasant New England community in which I had just settled. It seemed such an extraordinary notion -- that I could set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through woods to Georgia, or turn the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White Mountains to the fabled prow of Mount Katahdin, floating in forest 450 miles to the north in a wilderness few have seen. A little voice in my head said: "Sounds neat! Let's do it!"

I formed a number of rationalizations. It would get me fit after years of waddlesome sloth. It would be an interesting and reflective way to reacquaint myself with the scale and beauty of my native land after nearly twenty years of living abroad. It would be useful (I wasn't quite sure in what way, but I was sure nonetheless) to learn to fend for myself in the wilderness. When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer have to feel like such a cupcake. I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, "Yeah, I've shit in the woods."

And there was a more compelling reason to go. The Appalachians are the home of one of the world's great hardwood forests -- the expansive relic of the richest, most diversified sweep of woodland ever to grace the temperate world -- and that forest is in trouble. If he global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately hemlocks and flowery dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes, and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a time to experience this singular wilderness, it was now.

So I decided to do it. More rashly, I announced my intention -- told friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those who knew me. Then I bought some books and talked to people who had done the trail in whole or in part and came gradually to realize that this was way beyond -- way beyond -- anything I had attempted before.

Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, "Bear!" before sinking into a troubled unconsciousness.

The woods were full of peril -- rattlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex; rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels; merciless fire ants and ravening blackfly; poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak, and poison salamanders; even a scattering of moose lethally deranged by a parasitic worm that burrows a nest in their brains and befuddles them into chasing hapless hikers through remote, sunny meadows and into glacial lakes.

Literally unimaginable things could happen to you out there. I heard of a man who had stepped from his tent for a midnight pee and was swooped upon by a short-sighted hoot owl -- the last he saw of his scalp it was dangling from talons prettily silhouetted against a harvest moon -- and of a young woman who was woken by a tickle across her belly and peered into her sleeping bag to find a copperhead bunking down in the warmth between her legs. I heard four separate stories (always related with a chuckle) of campers and bears sharing tents for a few confused and lively moments; stories of people abruptly vaporized ("tweren't nothing left of him but a scorch mark") by body-sized bolts of lightning when caught in sudden storms on high ridgelines; of tents crushed beneath falling trees, or eased off precipices on ballbearings of beaded rain and sent paragliding on to distant valley floors, or swept away by the watery wall of a flash flood; of hikers beyond counting whose last experience was of trembling earth and the befuddled thought "Now what the----?"

It required only a little light reading in adventure books and almost no imagination to envision circumstances in which I would find myself caught in a tightening circle of hunger-emboldened wolves, staggering and shredding clothes under an onslaught of pincered fire ants, or dumbly transfixed by the sight of enlivened undergrowth advancing towards me, like a torpedo through water, before being bowled backwards by a sofa-sized boar with cold beady eyes, a piercing squeal, and a slaverous, chomping appetite for pink, plump, city-softened flesh.

Then there were all the diseases one is vulnerable to in the woods -- giardiasis, eastern equine encephalitis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, schistosomiasis, brucellosis, and shigellosis, to offer but a sampling. Eastern equine encephalitis, caused by the prick of a mosquito, attacks the brain and central nervous system. If you're lucky you can hope to spend the rest of your life propped in a chair with a bib around your neck, but generally it will kill you. There is no known cure. No less arresting is Lyme disease, which comes from the bite of a tiny deer tick. If undetected, it can lie dormant in the human body for years before erupting in a positive fiesta of maladies. This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all. The symptoms include, but are not limited to, headaches, fatigue, fever, chills, shortness of breath, dizziness, shooting pains in the extremities, cardiac irregularities, facial paralysis, muscle spasms, severe mental impairment, loss of control of body functions, and -- hardly surprising, really -- chronic depression.

Then there is the little-known family of organisms called hantaviruses, which swarm in the micro-haze above the feces of mice and rats and are hoovered into the human respiratory system by anyone unlucky enough to stick a breathing orifice near them -- by lying down, say, on a sleeping platform over which infected mice have recently scampered. In 1993 a single outbreak of hantavirus killed thirty-two people in the southwestern United States, and the following year the disease claimed its first victim on the AT when a hiker contracted it after sleeping in a "rodent-infested shelter." (All AT shelters are rodent infested.) Among viruses, only rabies, ebola, and HIV are more certainly lethal. Again, there is no treatment.

Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder. At least nine hikers (the actual number depends on which source you consult and how you define a hiker) have been murdered along the trail since 1974. Two young women would die while I was out there.

For various practical reasons, principally to do with the long, punishing winters of northern New England, there are only so many available months to hike the trail each year. If you start at the northern end, at Mount Katahdin in Maine, you must wait for the snows to clear in late May or June. If, on the other hand, you start in Georgia and head north, you must time it to finish before mid-October, when the snows blow back in. Most people hike from south to north with spring, ideally keeping one step ahead of the worst of the hot weather and the more irksome and infectious of insects. My intention was to start in the south in early March. I put aside six weeks for the first leg.

The precise length of the Appalachian Trail is a matter of interesting uncertainty. The U.S. National Park Service, which constantly distinguishes itself in a variety of ways, manages in a single leaflet to give the length of the trail as 2,155 miles and 2,200 miles. The official Appalachian Trail Guides, a set of eleven books each dealing with a particular state or section, variously give the length as 2,144 miles, 2,147 miles, 2,159 miles, and "more than 2,150 miles." The Appalachian Trail Conference, the governing body, in 1993 put the trail length at exactly 2,146.7 miles, then changed for a couple of years to a hesitantly vague "more than 2,150 miles," but has recently returned to confident precision with a length of 2,160.2 miles. In 1993, three people rolled a measuring wheel along its entire length and came up with a distance of 2,164.9 miles. At about the same time, a careful measure based on a full set of U.S. Geological Survey maps put the distance at 2,118.3 miles.

What is certain is that it is a long way, and from either end it is not easy. The peaks of the Appalachian Trail are not particularly formidable as mountains go -- the highest, Clingmans Dome in Tennessee, tops out at a little under 6,700 feet -- but they are big enough and they go on and on. There are more than 350 peaks over 5,000 feet along the AT, and perhaps a thousand more in the vicinity. Altogether, it takes about five months, and five million steps, to walk the trail from end to end.

And of course on the AT you must lug on your back everything you need. It may seem obvious, but it came as a small shock to me to realize that this wasn't going to be even remotely like an amble through the English Cotswolds or Lake District, where you head off for the day with a haversack containing a packed lunch and a hiking map and at day's end retire from the hills to a convivial inn for a hot bath, a hearty meal, and a soft bed. Here you sleep outdoors and cook your own food. Few people manage to carry less than forty pounds, and when you're hauling that kind of weight, believe me, never for a moment does it escape your notice. It is one thing to walk 2,000 miles, quite another to walk 2,000 miles with a wardrobe on your back.

My first inkling of just how daunting an undertaking it was to be came when I went to our local outfitters, the Dartmouth Co-Op, to purchase equipment. My son had just gotten an after-school job there, so I was under strict instructions of good behavior. Specifically, I was not to say or do anything stupid, try on anything that would require me to expose my stomach, say "Are you shitting me?" when informed of the price of a product, be conspicuously inattentive when a sales assistant was explaining the correct maintenance or aftercare of a product, and above all don anything inappropriate, like a woman's ski hat, in an attempt to amuse.

I was told to ask for Dave Mengle because he had walked large parts of the trail himself and was something of an encyclopedia of outdoor knowledge. A kindly and deferential sort of fellow, Mengle could talk for perhaps four days solid, with interest, about any aspect of hiking equipment.

I have never been so simultaneously impressed and bewildered. We spent a whole afternoon going through his stock. He would say things to me like: "Now this has a 70-denier high-density abrasion-resistant fly with a ripstop weave. On the other hand, and I'll be frank with you here" -- and he would lean to me and reduce his voice to a low, candid tone, as if disclosing that it had once been arrested in a public toilet with a sailor--"the seams are lap felled rather than bias taped and the vestibule is a little cramped."

I think because I mentioned that I had done a bit of hiking in England, he assumed some measure of competence on my part. I didn't wish to alarm or disappoint him, so when he asked me questions like "What's your view on carbon fiber stays?" I would shake my head with a rueful chuckle, in recognition of the famous variability of views on this perennially thorny issue, and say, "You know, Dave, I've never been able to make up my mind on that one -- what do you think?"

Together we discussed and gravely considered the relative merits of side compression straps, spindrift collars, crampon patches, load transfer differentials, air-flow channels, webbing loops, and something called the occipital cutout ratio. We went through that with every item. Even an aluminum cookset offered considerations of weight, compactness, thermal dynamics, and general utility that could occupy a mind for hours. In between there was lots of discussion about hiking generally, mostly to do with hazards like rockfalls, bear encounters, cookstove explosions, and snakebites, which he described with a certain misty-eyed fondness before coming back to the topic at hand.

With everything, he talked a lot about weight. It seemed to me a trifle overfastidious to choose one sleeping bag over another because it weighed three ounces less, but as equipment piled up around us I began to appreciate how ounces accumulate into pounds. I hadn't expected to buy so much -- I already owned hiking boots, a Swiss army knife, and a plastic map pouch that you wear around your neck on a piece of string, so I had felt I was pretty well there -- but the more I talked to Dave the more I realized that I was shopping for an expedition.

The two big shocks were how expensive everything was -- each time Dave dodged into the storeroom or went off to confirm a denier rating, I stole looks at price tags and was invariably appalled -- and how every piece of equipment appeared to require some further piece of equipment. If you bought a sleeping bag, then you needed a stuff sack for it. The stuff sack cost $29. I found this an increasingly difficult concept to warm to.

When, after much solemn consideration, I settled on a backpack -- a very expensive Gregory, top-of-the-range, no-point-in-stinting-here sort of thing -- he said, "Now what kind of straps do you want with that?"

"I beg your pardon?" I said, and recognized at once that I was on the brink of a dangerous condition known as retail burnout. No more now would I blithely say, "Better give me half a dozen of those, Dave. Oh, and I'll take eight of these -- what the heck, make it a dozen. You only live once, eh?" The mound of provisions that a minute ago had looked so pleasingly abundant and exciting -- all new! all mine! -- suddenly seemed burdensome and extravagant.

"Straps," Dave explained. "You know, to tie on your sleeping bag and lash things down."

"It doesn't come with straps?" I said in a new, level tone.

"Oh, no." He surveyed a wall of products and touched a finger to his nose. "You'll need a raincover too, of course."

I blinked. "A raincover? Why?"

"To keep out the rain."

"The backpack's not rainproof?"

He grimaced as if making an exceptionally delicate distinction. "Well, not a hundred percent...."

This was extraordinary to me. "Really? Did it not occur to the manufacturer that people might want to take their packs outdoors from time to time? Perhaps even go camping with them. How much is this pack anyway?"

"Two hundred and fifty dollars."

"Two hundred and fifty dollars! Are you shi----," I paused and put on a new voice. "Are you saying, Dave, that I pay $250 for a pack and it doesn't have straps and it isn't waterproof?"

He nodded.

"Does it have a bottom in it?"

Mengle smiled uneasily. It was not in his nature to grow critical or weary in the rich, promising world of camping equipment. "The straps come in a choice of six colors," he offered helpfully.

I ended up with enough equipment to bring full employment to a vale of sherpas -- a three-season tent, self-inflating sleeping pad, nested pots and pans, collapsible eating utensils, plastic dish and cup, complicated pump-action water purifier, stuff sacks in a rainbow of colors, seam sealer, patching kit, sleeping bag, bungee cords, water bottles, waterproof poncho, waterproof matches, pack cover, a rather nifty compass/thermometer keyring, a little collapsible stove that looked frankly like trouble, gas bottle and spare gas bottle, a hands-free flashlight that you wore on your head like a miner's lamp (this I liked very much), a big knife for killing bears and hillbillies, insulated long johns and undershirts, four bandannas, and lots of other stuff, for some of which I had to go back again and ask what it was for exactly. I drew the line at buying a designer groundcloth for $59.95, knowing I could acquire a lawn tarp at Kmart for $5. I also said no to a first-aid kit, sewing kit, anti-snake-bite kit, $12 emergency whistle, and small orange plastic shovel for burying one's poop, on the grounds that these were unnecessary, too expensive, or invited ridicule. The orange spade in particular seemed to shout: "Greenhorn! Sissy! Make way for Mr. Buttercup!"

Then, just to get it all over and done with at once, I went next door to the Dartmouth Bookstore and bought books--The Thru-Hiker's Handbook, Walking the Appalachian Trail, several books on wildlife and the natural sciences, a geological history of the Appalachian Trail by the exquisitely named V. Collins Chew, and the complete, aforementioned set of official Appalachian Trail Guides, consisting of eleven small paperback books and fifty-nine maps in different sizes, styles, and scales covering the whole trail from Springer Mountain to Mount Katahdin and ambitiously priced at $233.45 the set. On the way out I noticed a volume called Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, opened it up at random, found the sentence "This is a clear example of the general type of incident in which a black bear sees a person and decides to try to kill and eat him," and tossed that into the shopping basket, too.

I took all this home and carried it down to the basement in several trips. There was such a lot, nearly all of it technologically unfamiliar to me, which made it both exciting and daunting, but mostly daunting. I put the hands-free flashlight on my head, for the heck of it, and pulled the tent from its plastic packaging and erected it on the floor. I unfurled the self-inflating sleeping pad and pushed it inside and followed that with my fluffy new sleeping bag. Then I crawled in and lay there for quite a long time trying out for size the expensive, confined, strangely new-smelling, entirely novel space that was soon to be my home away from home. I tried to imagine myself lying not in a basement beside the reassuring, cozily domesticated roar of the furnace, but rather outside, in a high mountain pass, listening to wind and tree noise, the lonely howl of doglike creatures, the hoarse whisper of a Georgia mountain accent saying: "Hey, Virgil, there's one over here. Y'all remember the rope?" But I couldn't really.

I hadn't been in a space like this since I stopped making dens with blankets and card tables at about the age of nine. It was really quite snug and, once you got used to the smell, which I naively presumed would dissipate with time, and the fact that the fabric gave everything inside a sickly greenish pallor, like the glow off a radar screen, it was not so bad. A little claustrophobic perhaps, a little odd smelling, but cozy and sturdy even so.

This wouldn't be so bad, I told myself. But secretly I knew that I was quite wrong.

Bill Bryson A Walk In The Woods: Rediscovering America On The Appalachian Trail

[Hyfi]

Not only is it 12% ABV, I think it tastes odd, and no wonder. It's made with cherries, honey, and chocolate malt. If you like it, I suppose there's not much I can do, but please don't get your mom hooked on that crap!

I'll be taking a peek at the Flyers during commercial breaks of the Penn State game. I sure hope than can win yet another to make it 5 in a row after that awful stretch. Beating the Rangers 6-0 was a hoot.

Enjoy!
Swishdaddy

Definitely an acquired taste, but I can handle it for a case. It was a birthday gift from my wife and she enjoys it also. My bottle says it's only 11%, i must have gotten a weak batch.

[Rae]

I'm at work heading into what looks to be sub-zero temperatures overnight here in Minneapolis.

I haven't been reading as much as I like to either but I have vague notions of picking up where I left off in The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay a couple of weeks ago.

~Rae

[jonnyhambone]

sounds like I'll have to pick up some Christopher Moore... reading the last Harry Potter just for the pure brainless pleasure...laying on the bed in a sunbeam "reading" (napping) with Shearwater in the background this afternoon (just pre-ordered the new one from the Matador site today), not even thinking about venturing into that sub-zero Minneapolis day.
Happy New Year!

[Stone]

I got up today and continued my reading of books off of a BBC list of the 100 best books or some such list by reading some of Jude the Obscure, which I'm liking okay so far.

Mostly today it's football for me, and I've been listening to The Disintegration Loops and ripping some of the 7 inchers Jay sent me.

We are pretty low on beer (except some Heineken left over from Christmas), so I may have to have a glass of wine instead of the stout I'd rather be having.

Oh, I also lost a very close game of Candyland earlier.

[Troy]

I'm at work heading into what looks to be sub-zero temperatures overnight here in Minneapolis.

I haven't been reading as much as I like to either but I have vague notions of picking up where I left off in The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay a couple of weeks ago.

~Rae

I like the ideas of some of Chabon's books, but actually reading them feels like a slog for me. So serious. Chabon feels like something assigned for school. The Moore books are just goofy fun.

[3LB]

Last night at the Space Needle was a blast, but today has been a day of recovery, i.e. watching football.

[ForeverAutumn]

I know we're off topic here, but I have two question about the Kimble.

Can you back up the books on a computer or external HD so that you don't have to rely on Amazon?

I often buy and read a book and then pass it on to my Mom to read. So, can you 'lend' books, (i.e. put them on more than one unit) or do you have to lend your whole Kimble?

Thanks.

[Swish]

I know we're off topic here, but I have two question about the Kimble.

Can you back up the books on a computer or external HD so that you don't have to rely on Amazon?

I often buy and read a book and then pass it on to my Mom to read. So, can you 'lend' books, (i.e. put them on more than one unit) or do you have to lend your whole Kimble?

Thanks.

...that you can't download and share books with others (by the way, it's a 'Kindle', not a Kimble, although they used to make a decent piano . First of all, the files are in a format that only Kindle can open, and secondly, can you imagine how easy it would be to steal books electronically? I bought C the latest version 2 and it was $259 I believe, so the price has come down considerably. The easiest way to load the books on the unit is via wireless, although I believe you can load them on a PC and transfer to the Kindle with a USB cable. Here's a nice article that should tell you more:



THE BOTTOM LINE

By Edward C. Baig, USA TODAY
Hate to spoil the ending, but here's what you need to know about Kindle 2.

The second edition of Amazon's (AMZN) best-selling electronic reader looks better, reads better and addresses the first Kindle's (metaphorically speaking) torn pages. Still, most of the improvements are marginal enough that owners of the original Kindle ought not feel compelled to upgrade, especially at a pricey $359.

READERS WEIGH IN: Praise, but price is a drawback
BLOG: Kindle 2 creates deals for Kindle 1 shoppers

In a turbulent economy, first-time buyers may balk, too. Still, Kindle 2 represents the finest e-book reader you can buy, even if at times it leaves you wanting more. Color is years away. But why, in this day and age, no touch-screen?

Amazon began shipping the new Kindle on Monday, a day before it said it would. I've been curling up with one for a couple of weeks.

You can schlep a library of 1,500 books (plus newspapers, magazines and blogs) in a contraption that weighs less than a paperback. The built-in wireless store that lets you sample, purchase and download content in less than a minute is what distances the Kindle from e-book rivals such as Sony. The technology, which Amazon calls Whispernet, is built on top of Sprint's fast EV-DO network.

More than 240,000 books are for sale in the Kindle Store, including most best sellers, typically for under $10. Newspapers fetch $5.99 to $14.99 monthly; magazines, $1.25 to $3.49 per month.

The new model boasts easier, if still imperfect, navigation, and it has a slimmer and more attractive design, though it only comes in white. The first Kindle included a flimsy cover. This one doesn't, though for $30, you can get a leather cover that has a hinge to ensure it won't slide off. Let's dive in:

•Design. At slightly more than a third of an inch thick, Kindle 2 is a lot thinner and a tad taller than the original. One annoying drawback to the first Kindle was the way I kept inadvertently hitting the "next page" buttons on either edge of the display.

That's no longer a problem. Buttons on the new Kindle are smaller and less obtrusive.

Gone, too, is the rubber scroll wheel. Kindle 2 has a small five-way controller that is way better, if not perfect. Moving the cursor to any word in the text summons a dictionary definition at the bottom of the screen. There's also a keyboard for typing in search terms or adding notes to a book; I found it a little more difficult to type on than its predecessor.

The original Kindle had separate power and wireless buttons. Kindle 2 loses the wireless switch, a potential nuisance for fliers. To read on a plane, you'll have to remember to turn the unit on, turn wireless off through a menu setting, then power down again before takeoff.

Amazon says it increased the battery life on Kindle 2 by about 25%, meaning you can read for four or five days on a charge with wireless turned on, and two weeks with wireless turned off. Alas, the battery is no longer removable.

There's also more internal storage (the original held about 200 books). You could add storage on the first Kindle by inserting an optional SD memory card; there's no such slot on Kindle 2.

•Reading experience. Using electronic ink technology, the first Kindle did a fine job replicating reading on paper. But the crisp 6-inch electronic display of the Kindle 2 is a bit better, with 16 shades of gray, vs. four.

I sometimes read on my iPhone (using programs such as Stanza and Classics). The iPhone lets you read in the dark, something you cannot do on Kindle. But while reading eBooks on an iPhone is OK, the battery doesn't last near long enough. And, of course, you quickly appreciate the larger Kindle display.

I've been reading Stephen King's UR (the novella is a Kindle exclusive), The Yankee Years by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci, and articles in The New Yorker magazine, a worthy addition to Kindle's stable of subscriptions. For now, because of production issues, not all cartoons that appear in print make it onto the Kindle. And some fiction in the print edition has been withheld because of author rights.

As before, you can adjust text size. The lack of color means Kindle isn't ideal for illustrated books.

Amazon says the pages turn an average of 20% faster than on the original. While difficult to detect side by side with an older Kindle, page refresh on the new device never felt like an issue.

The new device also boasts an "experimental" feature, the ability to vocalize text. I don't expect a lot of people to use it. The computerized voice is no substitute for an audio book read by an actor. But not all books have audio versions, and Kindle can even read aloud your own documents.

You can share books on up to five Kindles with the same account, and through another new feature, keep them in sync. You cannot share magazine subscriptions across devices.

The book on Kindle 2 is mostly positive. If only it were a bit less expensive.

E-mail: ebaig@usatoday.com

[ForeverAutumn]

Great! Thanks Swish. The article says that you can share books on up to five Kindles with the same account. So if I bought Mom a Kindle, I can still lend her my books.

The cost of shipping and duty adds another $80 to the price for me. But I think it may still be worth looking into. Hubby and I do a lot of reading and I'm almost never without a book in my purse. I love the idea of virtual books vs. having to find room to store the real ones. Plus the ease of carrying this thing around.

Not to mention it helps to feed my electronic gadget addiction.

[Swish]

Great! Thanks Swish. The article says that you can share books on up to five Kindles with the same account. So if I bought Mom a Kindle, I can still lend her my books.

The cost of shipping and duty adds another $80 to the price for me. But I think it may still be worth looking into. Peter and I do a lot of reading and I'm almost never without a book in my purse. I love the idea of virtual books vs. having to find room to store the real ones. Plus the ease of carrying this thing around.

Not to mention it helps to feed my electronic gadget addiction.

...it was compared to a book. You can easily set it on your lap or whatever while freeing up your hands to hold a drink or whatever. Paperbacks can be a pain unless both your hands are free to keep your spot and hold the pages back. Once you use one you'll know.