For me however, I am still struggling to communicate in any situation outside a restaurant. I am getting braver at saying “je ne comprend pas” (I do not understand), and thus forcing the other person to switch to extremely basic French, mime, English, or a convoluted mixture of all three. The gender of nouns presents another challenge, and I was delighted to read how Mr Sedaris had come up with a solution:

What’s the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? … I tried using gender in my everyday English. “Hi, guys,” I’d say, opening a new box of paper clips, or “Hey, Hugh, have you seen my belt? I can’t find her anywhere.” I invented personalities for the objects on my dresser and set them up on blind dates. When things didn’t work out with my wallet, my watch drove a wedge between my hairbrush and my lighter.

The scenarios reminded me of my youth, when my sisters and I would enact epic dramas with our food. Ketchup-wigged french fries would march across our plates, engaging in brief affairs or heated disputes over carrot coins while burly chicken legs guarded the perimeter, ready to jump in should things get out of hand. Sexes were assigned at our discretion and were subject to change from one night to the next — unlike here, where the corncob and the string bean remain locked in their rigid masculine roles. Say what you like about southern social structure, but at least in North Carolina a hot dog is free to swing both ways.
[...]
It’s a pretty grim world when I can’t even feel superior to a toddler. Tired of embarrassing myself in front of two-year-olds, I’ve started referring to everything in the plural, which can get expensive but has solved a lot of my problems. In saying a melon, you need to use the masculine article. In saying the melons, you use the plural article, which does not reflect gender and is the same for both the masculine and the feminine. Ask for two or ten or three hundred melons, and the number lets you off the hook by replacing the article altogether. A masculine kilo of feminine tomatoes presents a sexual problem easily solved by asking for two kilos of tomatoes.

I’ve started using the plural while shopping, and Hugh has started using it in our cramped kitchen, where he stands huddled in the corner, shouting, “What do we need with four pounds of tomatoes?” I answer that I’m sure we can use them for something. The only hard part is finding someplace to put them. They won’t fit in the refrigerator, as I filled the last remaining shelf with the two chickens I bought from the butcher the night before, forgetting that we were still working our way through a pair of pork roasts the size of Duraflame logs. “We could put them next to the radios,” I say, “or grind them for sauce in one of the blenders. Don’t get so mad. Having four pounds of tomatoes is better than having no tomatoes at all, isn’t it?”

Hugh tells me that the market is off-limits until my French improves. He’s pretty steamed, but I think he’ll get over it when he sees the CD players I got him for his birthday.

– David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

A few months back we went to the Only 4 Senses Restaurant. The food was served by blind waiters and we sat in complete blackness in a basement near the Grand Place. We were taught to place our fingers inside our water glass to tell when it was full, and the chef asked us to guess what we were eating by taste alone. I had a casserole, which was relatively easy to manage, but poor Adrian found that cutting and scooping a vegetarian lasagna was a little more challenging. Our guide would ask us if we had finished eating or if we wanted some more to drink, because he had no other way to tell. He would constantly use our names so that we knew who he was talking to. We spoke to our waiter about his life in Brussels, and then after the dinner we met his guide dog.

I have also just finished reading Star Gazing by Linda Gillard, recommended to me by the robots at Amazon. It is a fascinating Scottish story, told from the perspective of 40 year old woman called Marianne, who has been blind from birth. Marianne describes her world with no visual clues, and gives great insight into the daily life and loves without vision. Dropping ones keys, for example, can be a potentially tragic event.

There is a great theme of music within the novel, and her sighted friends often use orchestral analogies to explain the world to Marianne. One of them takes her star-gazing, and explains the constellation Boötes:

‘If you look east one of the brightest starts you’ll see is Arcterus. It has a yellow orange glow… they’d sound like… flutes. No piccolos. Shrill. Arcturus looks warmer. A cello maybe… on second thoughts make that a viola’.

I was unfamiliar with most of the references to opera composers and classical music pieces. Much in the way that Marianne understood the images through her familiarity with music, I felt as if I gained an understanding of the music through my visualisation of the images. It would have been lovely to create a playlist of the main songs from the novel, and play these in the background as I immersed myself into the story.

Hopefully, I will never know what it is like to be blind, but through these small experiences I hope that I have gained a little more understanding of what it would be like to live without vision.

If I had never bought the kindle, I never would have thought to read Middlemarch, and I would have missed out on a truly majestic work. But because it was on the list of the 100 best books of all time and it was free, I transferred it to my kindle for a rainy day. I didn’t know anything about the book, but I liked the sound of the name. I started reading and I was instantly hooked. It wasn’t until about half way through that I learned that George Eliot was the psydonym of Mary Anne Evans, changing the voice I heard in my head from male to female. Written in 1871, nearly 140 years ago, the characters were vivid and fascinating. This book is set in the ficticious town of Middlemarch in England, and follows a dozen people through their lives from 1830 onwards. The prose was a pure delight, and it was so easy to highlight my favourite passages on the kindle without damaging her words.

When a modest and religious young woman fell in love with a man she did not know: “She filled up all blanks with unmanifested perfections, interpreting him as she interpreted the works of Providence, and accounting for seeming discords by her own deafness to the higher harmonies.”

One man’s opinion of a woman who asked too many questions: “She is a good creature—­that fine girl—­but a little too earnest,” he thought. “It is troublesome to talk to such women. They are always wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand the merits of any question”

On the scientist and his method of “combining and constructing with the clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet more energetic alliance with impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its own work.”

On joy versus misery: “It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight—­ in art or in anything else. Would you turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing over misery? I suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom.”

On arguments between spouses: “There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.”

On enduring difficulties: “Oh, my dear, when you have a clergyman in your family you must accommodate your tastes: I did that very early. When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn’t have the end without them.”

On how to chastise a dog for misbehaving: She took his fore-paws in one hand, and lifted up the forefinger of the other, while the dog wrinkled his brows and looked embarrassed. “Fly, Fly, I am ashamed of you,” Mary was saying in a grave contralto. “This is not becoming in a sensible dog; anybody would think you were a silly young gentleman.”

On choosing a husband: “No, indeed. I don’t love him because he is a fine match.” “What for, then?” “Oh, dear, because I have always loved him. I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.”

My working week became a little bit brighter with a gift from my Secret Santa from the intertubes. Even though my Secret Santa posted this box to me in November from Canada, it only just arrived on my doorstep. It was lovely to find all these tokens from Quebec, especially as Montreal it was a candidate for our new home back in 2008. The package contained many regional bookmarks, a lovely card from Santa, as well as The Shadow of the Wind, Flashman, and a local cookbook with lots of interesting family recipes. Furthermore, some delicious maple sugar, coffee candy, and hot chocolate mix to keep me company when I am curled up with these new novels.

I started Flashman on my metro trip to work this morning, and by 29 pages in I agree with his self-assessment that he is “a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and oh yes, a toady.” I am looking forward to learning about military history from a very interesting perspective, as well as introducing some French-Canadian influences into my Australian-Belgian cooking repertoire.

Thank-you Santa, for sending me some exceptional literary and culinary delights.

“Who are all those people outside?”

Father tilted his head to the left, looking a little confused by the question. “Soldiers, Bruno, ” he said. “And secretaries. Staff workers. You’ve seen them all before, of course.”

“No, not them,” said Bruno. “The people I see from my window. In the huts, in the distance. They’re all dressed the same.”

“Ah, those people,” said Father, nodding his head and smiling slightly. “Those people… well, they’re not really people at all, Bruno.”

Marden is numb and unable to comprehend the personal and global tragedies of the war, his loss so great it was impossible for me to grasp. What really shook me were the descriptions of Belgium after just after the war. I have visited these cities, now so carefully reconstructed, and it is so difficult for me to imagine them destroyed. For me, these are sunlit towns filled with happy memories, so to read of their annihilation was like learning of the abusive childhood of a dear friend.

It was like having heard of heaven and hell, and finding out, in one revelatory moment, that this is what they consisted of – not magic zones of fire, not fleecy zones of clouds, but a vaguely undulating series of muddy fields that looked like a lumpy pudding.
“Voila“, Conner said, smiling ironically. “The Western Front”.
…
Back on the island he had has a friend named Andre Slater who had a farm and grew potatoes. It wasn’t a particularly big farm, not by western standards, and yet the battlefield he stared at could have fit inside with room to spare. In the end, it was this comparison that defeated him – thinking how many boys had tried trying to cross Andre Slater’s farm.

Photo from JaaQ

This book is full of stories of human kindness in the face of oppression, of people finding joy in the smallest of wonders. How a little spirit and daring can take a handful of strangers, books, and potatoes and turn it into the formidable Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

”To tell the truth, as long as the Occupation was to last, I met more than one nice German soldier. You would, you know, seeing some of them as much as every day for five years. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for some of them – stuck here knowing their families at home were being bombed to pieces. Didn’t matter then who started it in the first place. Not to me anyway.

Why there’d be soldiers on guard in the back of potato lorries going to the army’s mess hall – children would follow them, hoping potatoes would fall off into the street. Soldiers would look straight ahead, grim-like, and then flick potatoes off the pile – on purpose. They did the same with lumps of coal – my, those were precious when we didn’t have enough fuel left.”

War threatens to rip the humanity from people, to turn them into beasts. Often fueled by religion, it divides the world into “them” and “us”, and declares that we must destroy the enemy at any cost. Today marks the 91st anniversary since the armistice for the cessation of hostilities was signed between the Allies and Germany. Here’s to hoping that some day the human race has enough reason, compassion, and understanding to end all hostilities across the globe.

Photo from Spacmonster

This year I have joined the Bloggers’ Holiday Book Swap. Thank you to Amanda, Amy, Ana, Chris, Debi, Eva, Jill and Lenore for organising this. I look forward to sending a little something to a fellow blogger, and it has also inspired me to finally start a list of my own favourite books. More book recommendations requested.

Image from breadslice

I tore open the strip, lifted up the box, and there was my kindle 2 sitting inside the box. I lifted that out, and there was a USB cord that plugs into a US power plug. Amazon did warn me that it would ship with one, but it is still disappointing that they didn’t spring for compatible adaptors for the various countries. I peel off the sticker, thinking that the instructions were printed on them. Instead, they stay on the screen. It takes me a moment to realise that the instructions are actually in written in the e-ink used for the screen. As it requires no power to maintain the ink, the instructions stay on the screen from the factory to the customer. So I am very impressed with the screen. It really does look like the text is printed straight onto it. Whenever I change pages there is a black flash as the electronic ink rearranges itself on the page.

Image from breadslice

I plug it into my USB port to charge, and it docks straight away and acts like a simple flash drive. Unlike the iPhone that requires iTunes to add media, I can simple drag and drop books from any computer. Though, like apple, if you want to experience media from their store, you must use their hardware to do so. In addition to the proprietary .azw format, it also accepts .mobi and .txt files, while other files (such as .pdf) have to be emailed to username@free.kindle.com, where they are then emailed back in a compatible format.

Whenever I showed the device to others, my most common phrase was “it is not a touch-screen”. While the “next page” button is easy enough to find, navigating throughout the device is not intuitive. The tiny little joystick is frustrating, and the keys on the keyboard are far too small. If one is going to dedicate one third of the device to a physical keyboard, then one should make it a good one. Instead, there is all this dead space around the screen that does nothing but bulk up the size. It is also surprisingly heavy at 540 grams, compared with an iPhone at 133 grams or a paperback at 300 grams. Lab126 (who made the kindle) are based in Cupertino, so you’d think that they’d be able to channel a little bit of Jonathan Ive when they were putting it together.

It is connected to the internet via the cellular 3G data network, and does not have WiFi capabilities. US customers can access the whole web, but this option is currently disabled for international customers. To remind me of this fact, the bookmarks in the web browser still list CNN, BBC, etc, but when I select them, I get an error message. The electronic instruction manual also has not been modified to reflect this, so it still talks about nifty features, such as google and blogs, even though they are disabled in my region (“due to local restrictions, web browsing is not available for all countries”).

The kindle can hold 1500 books and gives me unlimited online access to Wikipedia without any further charges in over 100 countries in Europe, the USA, Japan, India, Brazil, South America, Australia, and NZ. It comes with an integrated version of the New Oxford American Dictionary. The battery lasts for fourteen days when wireless is switched off, and for four when wireless is on. I can play Minesweeper and GoMoku. I can transfer any of the 20 000 free books from Project Gutenberg via a USB connection with my computer, or purchase any of the 295,865 books, 54 newspapers, or 33 magazines from the Amazon store.

Image from B.K. Dewey

It is depressing that the currently kindle bestseller is a horrid right-wing piece of rubbish by Glenn Beck (“You’re minding your own business, when some idiot informs you that guns are evil… we should copy the UK’s health-care system… or the rich have to finally start paying their fair share of taxes”). Luckily, the others in the top dozen include “Evidence for Evolution”, “Outliers”, and “The Help”. I can browse the entire kindle catalogue right on my device, read reviews, download the first chapter for free, or buy the whole book and have it instantly delivered to my kindle.

One of the unexpected delights of the kindle are the beautiful screen-savers that appear every time the device goes to sleep. From portraits of famous authors to scientific illustrations to illuminated manuscripts, these images remind me the significance of what I am holding. A whole library in my hands, from Gilgamesh right up to Richard Dawkins, as well as the entirety of Wikipedia. No longer needing to trek to specialty English-language bookstores or wait a month for Amazon.co.uk to deliver, I can have nearly any book that I wish in my hands in under sixty seconds.

Image from .Larry Page

Inspired by this list, my current kindle contains the following free e-books from Project Gutenberg:

Dante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321), The Divine Comedy
Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875), Fairy Tales and Stories
Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375), Decameron
Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500).
Honore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850), Old Goriot
L. Frank Baum, USA, (1856- 1919), The Marvelous Land of Oz
Geoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400), Canterbury Tales
Anton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904), Selected Stories
Joseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924), Nostromo
Charles Dickens, England, (1812-1870), Great Expectations
Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881), Crime and Punishment
George Eliot, England, (1819-1880), Middlemarch
Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880), Madame Bovary
Gilgamesh, Mesopotamia (c 1800 BC).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832), Faust
Nikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852), Dead Souls
Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC), The Iliad and The Odyssey
Knut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952), Hunger.
Victor Hugo, France (1802-1885), The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906), A Doll’s House
James Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941), Ulysses
Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924), The Trial
Kalidasa, India, (c. 400), The Recognition of Sakuntala
DH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930), Sons and Lovers
Giacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837), Complete Poems
Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC).
Herman Melville, United States, (1819-1891), Moby Dick
Shikibu Murasaki, Japan, (N/A), The Tale of Genji Genji
Ovid, Italy, (c 43 BC), Metamorphoses
Edgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849), The Complete Tales
Francois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553), Gargantua and Pantagruel
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616), Don Quixote
Laurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC), Oedipus the King
Jonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745), Gulliver’s Travels
Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910), War and Peace; Anna Karenina
Virgil, Italy, (70-19 BC), The Aeneid

(I am very sure that there will be some trashy vampire novels mixed in there soon to contaminate all that literature)

So, while the kindle 2 feels like a chunky 1990’s device, it delivers on its main promise. It has a paper-equivalent screen and instant access to multitudinous books. It is the first internationally-available transbook. One day, an object like this will be the portal into every library in the world. That is why my kindle is called Atlas.

NB: As an added bonus, I just got an email from Amazon today saying that they had dropped the price of the kindle by $20, and they were retrospectively refunding me the difference via a transfer to my credit card.