• When I was thinking about getting an iPad, I wondered what format I should buy books in. I was thinking the contenders were Amazon’s proprietary format versus ePub books (sadly largely with encryption in both cases); but when I actually got the iPad, I discovered that it’s a really great PDF reader. (Don’t get me wrong, I’d love a retina screen on it, but it works quite well as is.) And, as it happened, some of the early books that I bought were from the Pragmatic Programmers, which lets you get books in PDF and ePub (and Amazon’s format, but I don’t have a Kindle yet, so no reason to choose that if I’m not buying from Amazon). And, for now, I’m liking PDF books a lot more than ePub. I just hope that the book industry doesn’t take as long as the music industry to start embracing non-encrypted formats, so I can get PDF books from other sources.
• Having said that, non-page-based formats do have their uses. A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Nicola Griffith’s Always on the Kindle app on my iPad. And then I found myself out of the house with some time to kill, so I pulled out my phone and switched over to reading the book on that. (I didn’t have my iPad with me.) And that worked great, much better than reading a PDF on my phone would have or sitting around being bored would have.
• Another unexpected electronic book benefit: our dog Zippy is getting rather old, and wakes me up squeaking a couple of times a night on average. (For better or for worse, I’m a much lighter sleeper than Liesl is.) Sometimes he needs to go out, but sometimes he’s achy and just needs cuddling for a while. And I like being able to read while cuddling with him without having to turn on a light.
• Speaking of Nicola Griffith, I’d forgotten just how amazing an author she is. Or rather, I’d been somewhat reminded of that when I read her memoir, and I like her blog as well, so I’d been meaning to dig back into her fiction, but I hadn’t gotten around to it until the last month. I don’t think I’d reread Ammonite since it came out, but it’s quite good; better still is Slow River, and rereading The Blue Place was eye-opening. I’d never read Stay or Always, but I’m quite happy to have remedied that omission.
• Speaking of omissions, I’d somehow stopped reading Madeline L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journal after the first two books. No idea why I stopped then; I went back and reread them just now, and they’re rather wonderful. Though so far I’m not enjoying the third one as much; maybe it will grow on me (it took a while for me to appreciate the first one, I seem to recall), or maybe it’s just more targeted at Christians?
• I’m very glad to have been reading a lot of fiction these days. I’d been weighting my reading rather heavily towards technical books over much of the last year; partly for good reasons, but partly because I’d been swayed by sales of electronic books at a couple of publishers. And while electronic books don’t raise exactly the same inventory concerns as physical books, they’re still inventory, and the fact that I own them still unduly influences me to read them. I’ll have to be more vigilant about that in the future.
• Sad that Borders is going out of business. I like independent bookstores, but to me it’s much much more important to have a large selection of books available for purchase, and Borders did a great job of that as a chain; I visited the local Borders about as frequently over the last few years as any other physical bookstore. Their time has passed, but I salute them and will miss them.

In general I’m a sucker for series; poking around a bit, I realized that L’Engle had written two other related series. I’m not sure how many of the volumes in those series I’d read when I was growing up, but I have only the dimmest of memories of them, so I imagine the number is small. Which is out-of-character for me; I decided to remedy that lack on this go around.

The three series are quite a body of work, it turns out. I’d remembered the three aforementioned books fairly accurately: among other things, they can be considered a science fiction trilogy, but a very odd one indeed. I was and am a big science fiction fan, but the science in those books doesn’t make any sense; part of what replaces it is mysticism, which I’m also a fan of, but it’s not particularly convincing mysticism, either. A Wrinkle in Time is still a special book, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet pushes some of my buttons, but their odd relationship to genres I liked probably explains why I didn’t read L’Engle more widely. (Especially given that her other books mostly aren’t in those genres at all, being instead straight fiction.)

This time, though, the books in all three series worked for me. I won’t say that I loved every book that I read, but I at least liked all of them; probably my favorite one was Meet the Austins, which had me crying on one or two occasions. I doubt I would have enjoyed them nearly as much when I was younger—in particular, family is a big theme across all of them, and family is a lot more important to me as a parent than it’s ever been to me as a child—but there’s a lot of special stuff in them.

I also really appreciated her unabashedly including important themes. Family, as mentioned above, appears in every book, but it’s not the only repeated theme: they’re pervaded with goodness, with love, with friends, with growing up and finding your way, with science, with music, with art in general. And with religion, something I have an odd relationship with: in particular, I’m an atheist, but one who feels unhappy disliking Christianity and Christians. The last few decades have been hard on that score—there have been a lot of people in the press doing evil in the name of Christianity—so I’m glad to read about people whom I like very much and for whom Christianity is a quiet but strong underpinning to their lives.

I ended up going through thirteen of her books over the course of a month and a half; that wouldn’t have been a particularly fast pace for me over much of my life, but I have enough competing for my attention that it’s pretty unusual for me these days. Now that I’ve finished those books, I’m slowing down my pace of L’Engle reading, but not stopping entirely; in particular, I want to read through her autobiography, because I’m curious where all these repeated elements in her work grew out of.