Kindle2, A Brave new Accessible World... Almost

Regular readers of this blog know that when Amazon trumpeted its new speech enhanced Kindle2 as an accessible reading device, certain blind people went ballistic. They had a couple reasons, one of which is balid, though how they handled their protest is another matter. The fact is that although the Kindle2 does use a digitally delivered voice to read the books themselves, the navigation is not only not readable but is in small print. Therefore a person who could not read the books without the speech output cannot read the menus at all. And although I can get around some of that with a magnifier, many people with print impairments will have to rely on other people to find the books they have downloaded. And that is definitely not cool.

I'm a problem solver besides, so I can handle most barriers on my new Kindle2 -- ues, I bought one. I had a little cash and two choices.. to buy the Victor Reader Stream and have access to downloadable books from the NLS and other special libraries for print impaired people, or a kindle2. Since I have pretty much cleared out the titles the NLS has in my chosen genres, and since I will get to borrow a Stream from the library eventually, I decided on the Kindle2. Even if the pickin's are slim there now I figure books I like will make it to Kindle soon enough and what's more new books will show up there months before the NLS. I figured out that one does not need to use the Kindle Store on the Kindle itself but can get books on Amazon's web site. I can memorize the location of some of the menu items I am most likely to read. And when push comes to shove, I have other assistive devices that I can incestuously use to access the Kindle2's screen.

There are several things I absolutely love about my new Kindle2, which I named loki. (Ok, Ok, but I like trickster gods, all right?) Most important to me is the voices installed. There is a female and a male and they are both remarkably good voices. I have heard many, many such all the way from robot sounding to quite human, and this one is perhaps the second best I have ever heard. however, as Amazon's central purpose for adding a screen reader is to attract people who are not print impaired, I am afraid the Kindle2 and this feature may be short-lived. "Sighted people won't put up with it," as one blind acquaintance observed. What sounds clear and acceptable to us is awkward and even undecipherable to people who have not been listening to digital boices for years and years.

I like the weight and size of the thing. It is obnly 1/3 of an inch thick and about the size of a paperback book. i bought myself a pretty little folksy shoulder bag to carry it around in. It has speakers, so I will not need to listen on headphones as I do with my iPod. Most of all I like the instant access to books I want to read. No wait even for a package to arrive... boom, there it is.

Last but decidedly not least, my own novel is now on Kindle! Not only is it available to others and at about a quarter of the price, I can read it now too! One frustration I have had with my beautiful print book is that it may as well have been written in Greek for all I know.. I can't read the print. But the other day my fully sighted husband and I sat on our couch and listened to the introductio to An Involuntary King.. and we h both had tears in our eyes.

My husband, Jim, is now more or less patiently waiting for the next version of Kindle with full speech output so I can buy it, and he can have Loki!

Sharpe's Fortress, by Bernard Cornwell

Sharpe's Fortress
by Bernard Cornwell

Sharpe's Fortress is the third of Bernard Cornwell's Star-Wars-like return to a time before the first Sharpe novel he wrote (Sharpe's Rifles), and the third and last of those set in India. Like Tiger and Triumpph we meet a very young Richard Sharpe and, unfortunately in my opinion, his relationships with people like Sir Arthur Wellesley, Crawford, and Obadiah Hakeswell that we will meet again, ostensibly for the first time, in the oldest books. I jsut found out that Patrick Harper shows up in Sharpe's Prey, next after the book we are reading now, and I sure hope he and Sharpe don't actually meet. It would, I think, ruin the original meeting in Sharpe's Rifles.

The title location in Sharpe's Fortress is the mountain top and heretofore impreganable fortress of Gawlighur. Now remember all these novels are about real battles and, except for the fictional charcters' roles in it, absolutely accurate in terms of events and battles. At the behinning of the novel, the newly commissioned Ensign Sharpe is having a very bad time of it and regretting wanting to be an officer. The men don't respect him and the other officers look down on him. Plus he is considerable older than the usually teenaged ensign. He is relieved when he is transferred from a battle regiment to a job overseeing supplies delivery. His boss in this duty is a corrupt and venial fellow who distrusts him from the start, especially when Mr. Sharpe exposes the Indian merchant he has been cheating on the army with. It so happens this man's righthand weasel is none other than Obadiah Hakeswell, the man who hates Sharpie to pieces. He has Hakeswell give Sharpe to the brother of the merchant, now hanged, who pits him against two jettis in a ring. Defeating them and with the hellp of Indian allies, Sharpe makes his way to where the siege of Gawlighur is about to begin. he manages, of course, to be the first over the wall of the inner fortress and pulls another James Bond villain non-execution of Hakeswell. If you remember William Dodd from triumph, well he's in this one too.

The thing with Sharpe novels is that they are formulaic, almost identical, and who cares>?! If you like one, you will like them all.. well, maybe with the exception of Sharpe's Gold, which is not even very good. Sharpe hasa to deal with inept upper class officers, can count on a few good eggs, is loved and left by beautiful women, fights like a demon, and manages too be personally responsible for every victory. And it's a glorious ride all the way.

This book is available in hardback, paperback, Kindle, and audio download.

Here Be Dragons, by Sharon Kay Penman

Here Be Dragons
By Sharon Kay Penman

When Sharon Kay Penman writes dramatic historical novels, she surpasses all possible expectations. This book was her second one, the first being the triumphant The Sunne in Splindour, and she rivaled her own work. You simply cannot go wrong with a Penman.

Here Be Dragons is the story of Joanna, bastard daughter of King John of England. It is divided into two "Books". Book One focuses primarily on Joanna's relationship with her affectionate father. When her mother, bitter and self-destructive, dies when Joanna is five years old, only happenstance finds her being taken to her father, still just the younger brother of the king, King Richard I, that is. He sup rises her by welcoming her with open arms as he did with all his bastards. All she knows, therefore, of the man is that he is a kind, loving and generous father. Her idyllic life with him ends when he marries her off to Prince Llewellyn ap Yorweth, the future "Llewellyn the Great" of Wales,. At first she is too young to be his wife in any but name only, but once the two connect sexually their relationship develops into a passionate lusty one. The two flies in the ointment are her unwillingness to hear bad spoken about her father and the Welsh suspicion of her as a Norman.

Book Two starts after King John dies and Joanna has long since had to accept that her father was really two men, the kind father and the vindictivve and cruel monarch. She now has children with Llewellyn, including their son Dafydd. Llewellyn has a son by his first mistress, a revbellious young man called Gryffydd who detests Joanna and Dafydd. When she sets him up to show his violent jealousy in his father's presence, he is sent to confinement in a stronghold. Llewellyn makes Dafydd his heir and when he learns of Joanna's part in the incident, he goes off to war angry. It is during the month he is gone that joanna turns to William de Braoise, a cad of the first order, for reassurance. She cuts it off, but William, not realizing she means it, shows up in her chamber just as Llewllyn arrives home. I have to say that Llewellyn's reaction was very painful.. not his hanging of William or imprison ment of Joanna, but the evident agony he himself is in. The remainder of the book is about his and Joanna's reconciliation. I was relieved that the book ends long before any death scenes for the two.

If I have any criticism of this book it is that in order to give both Joanna and John an equal number of scenes in Book One, I felt that Penman had to stretch to fill Joanna's scenes. I know she had to show the fraying trust between Joanna and her husband, but I think this could have been done in fewer richer scenes. But compared to the mastery throughout the novel, this criticism is insignificant.

I have read Edith Pargeter's The Heaven Tree Trilogy whose second volume, The Green Branch, includes the story of Joanna and William de Braoise. The two authors had radically opposite takes on the affair. The only element in common was that Llewllyn and Joanna were themselves in love. In both I found I did not care much for Joanna, generally as well as in her role in the affair. Penman has her motivation for the affair a complex mix of loneliness, desire, and pity for William, who for his part is a notorious philanderer with other men's wives. Pargeter portrayed Joanna as reaching menopause and feeling old and undesirable, but Willilam in The Green Vranch is truly in love. Like the historical man, both Williams are hanged, but in Pargeter's story she accomplished two full weeks of deep mourning in me. The scene where he waits to be hoisted to die and gazes where he knows Joanna is, tears in his eyes, almost killed me. So you can imagine that reading a different version of the story filled me with trepidation. What saved it for me is that the ensuing reconciliation between Llewellyn and Joanna was so moving.

This is a sure bet --- if you haven't read it, put it high up on your list.

This book is available in hardback, paperback, and on Kindle.

Brave New World: Encore une fois

Brave New World: Encore une fois

Absolution by Murder, by Peter Tremayne

Absolution by Murder
By Peter Tremayne

A Sister Fidelma Mystery

This murder mystery takes Sister Fidelma, a young but highly respected advocate of Brehon law in 7th century Ireland, to Northumbria where she finds customs quite repellent. All these Saxons with their crude ways, I mean, really!

It is the occasion of a synod to decide whether Northumbria will continue to follow the Irish Church of St. Collumba of Iona or to bow to pressure and switch to Rome. Champions of both camps are present and ready to debate, argue, brawl and, it seems, to kill for their side. That is exactly what happens. The Abbess of Kildare, selected to be the orator for the Irish faction, is found dead in her cubicle with her throat cut. Fidelma and a Saxon monk named Edulf are charged by the King of Northumbria to discover who killed her and why before the synod blows up in every one's faces. One of the most promising suspects is murdered as well, apparently hanged, and then a young monk who asked Fidelma to meet him so he could share some intelligence dies too, á la Duke of Clarence, drowned in a tun of wine. Throughout the threat that the killer will turn out to be trying to hedge Rome's bets puts pressure on Fidelma and Edulf to solve the murders as quickly as possible.

If you don't know who the murder is almost from the start, even before the woman is killed, then you are not paying attention. The hints are broad.. the very reasons Edulf gives for why a woman cannot be the murderer points to the woman who is. I warn you, I am not going to dissemble about this because this whole aspect of the novel is part of why I was not impressed. I do not like anything about the portrayal of Sister Gwid. Tremayne falls all over himself to remind you, in almost every sentence, that she is a big butch girl. I thought if I heard about how big her hands are and how ungainly she was I would scream. Then we find out she is stalking the Abbess and is a fan of Sappho's poetry... duh, what could this mean??? How the principals judge the motive for the murder, that Gwid could not forgive the Abbess for quitting to get married to one of those disgusting - ick - men, offended me. I know it's fiction, but the portrayal of a monk as a mincing effeminate fellow just added to my conclusion that the author himself does not care for gays. They decide not that Gwid's unrequited love for the Abbess drove her to despair and murder but that the killing was for the most dishonorable reason.. lust. Oh I see.. gay people are all about lust, not love.

I know lots of people love the Sister Fidelma mysteries.. maybe they like the strong female protagonist. I would too, but Fidelma seems to be all about judgment, not justice. She seems arrogant and intolerant to me. The take on a gay crush just confirms that to me. It goes beyond an accurate take on attitudes of the time. It feels like an agenda. Top that off with the blatant Saxon-bashing going on. As into Ireland as I am and as likely to use the term Sassenachs, I learned from the persistently negative image of Saxons in this book -- she even disapproves of their harsh-sounding language -- that I am also defensive of my beloved Saxon characters in my own novels.. To paraphrase a Texan t-shirt, don't mess with Wessex!

The Sister Fidelma books are famous for the repetition of certain phrases. A friend told me that when her husband and she listened to one of the short story anthologies on a cross-country trip bit became a joke to anticipate when Fidelma's hair would next come loose from her headdress... In Absolution b y Murder it's people biting their lips. I am surprised anyone could talk by the end of the book with all the bit lips.

Perhaps what troubled me most was Tremayne's oddly rarefied view of Irish culture. The man is a scholar on the subject, for heaven's sake, but he seems to think Ireland was and is perfect. He comes right out and states that Ireland at the time was a place of peace and justice... at least until other people came along and messed everything up. May I remind him that the Celts kicked the butts of the people who lived in Ireland when they arrived and each other for centuries thereafter? Mine may be an unconditional love for Ireland and the Irish, but it is not a fantasy.

The only think about this book I recommend is that it is an involving mystery so long as you ignore the broad hints slathered on like butter on soda bread.

About my spelling of character names. I listen to "talking books" and have not seen the spellings. Feel free to correct me.

Druids, by Morgan Llywelyn

Druids
By Morgan Llywelyn

"Life is change, and simplicity had been swept away on a Roman floodtide."

Morgan Llywelyn's Druids is the story of the eradication of free Gaul by the Roman general Julius Caesar. It takes place in what would someday be called France during the first century before the Christian era. The Chief Druid is the "soul friend" of the great Gaulish leader Vercingetorix, whose skepticism about Druid magic is an ever present division between the two men. Ultimately, however, neither might nor magic can stop the flood tide of the Romans' technology and discipline. The entire society based on the druidical earth religion is fated to be squeezed ever north and west and ultimately blotted out by Christianity.

Llywelyn's plot is subtle, though you don't notice that at first. Romans are a threat on the border when the tale begins, becoming more ruthless and more immediate as it develops. The Gauls at first are willing to let Rome in the backdoor in exchange for the luxuries traders bring in, but the Roman genera's best ally is the inability of the Gauls to work together to present a unified resistance. This is partly their tradition but also in reaction to brutality of Roman retribution for "rebellion". Vercingetorix and his Druid seek to remedy this, and here's where the subtlety sneaks in, for they start to adopt Roman discipline, tactics and technology in order to defeat the Romans, surrendering their unique identity quite voluntarily.

In Ann Parson's Mystery Book Discussion group recently we talked about whether you can like a book without liking a main character. I can categorically affirm that you can, as I really rather detested the narrator, the Chief Druid. I rather wish the main character had been Vercingetorix, but that is the author's decision. I know she had her reasons. I felt cheated on Vercingetorix's part as he loses all while the narrator simply retires into the woods with his three wives. I know he lost much more, but if he believed his own view of death, that it is a short phase in life, he definitely made out much better than his friend, whom he annoyingly calls "Rix".

The novel itself also sneaks up on you. I almost hit the off button a few times early in the book, finding myself not enjoying it as much as I have other Llywelyn's. But I stayed with it and am glad I did. There is a sweet bit of information revealed in the brief author's note at the end that tickled me and would not have come as any sort of surprise to the Chief Druid that you will just have to learn for yourself.