| Killy_Vorkosigan said: Now about the stuf I'd like to add |
Yes to the highlighted--nothing against everything else you said, but I've read Lovecraft and Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu is one of those texts everyone should read. I read it, funnily enough, after playing Advance Wars, as if it would somehow help me in that!
Great selection of Lovecraft stories there, too. I'd add The Shadow Over Innsmouth to those recommendations. Lovecraft's bad stories are pretty damn bad, but he makes up for that because his best stuff is pretty much in a league of its own.
And on the paper vs ebook side, like I mentioned, I got a kindle earlier and will now be buying the majority of my books through that. It's a great reading experience, honestly, coming from someone who amassed over 500 books. I cut that down to 250 when I left university because I then needed to move house twice. I'm now living in my parent's new (old) house while they renovate it, and it's just not practical to own so many paper books when I'm young and not settled down anywhere. I'll be holding onto quite a few of my paper books, but anything I can get cheaply/for free through kindle I'll get rid of the physical copy. I'll still buy stuff like Hyrule Historia, or Firefly: A Celebration, because they're more like books were eight centures ago: carefully constructed, lavish tomes that celebrate the material in them. One of the downsides during book history to mass production of books (a small downside versus the propagation of literacy), was the way in which books went from being crafted beautifully, to being near identical pieces with small, dull typeset. It's one of the reason I love my illustrated, hardcover Tolkien editions: it's a celebration of just how brilliant that particular text is.
I'd love to own the fancy, hardcover editions of A Song of Ice and Fire that they do, too. That being said, I'd recommend dedicated e-readers to anyone that loves reading. The practicality and pricing options are great, and it's a really good experience. I have a backlit one and won't be going back to paper books for the majority of my reading: but as I said, high quality physical volumes will always have a home on my bookshelves.
