Electronic book reader?

I've just got back from a seven week stint in Australia and New Zealand. I left two books in Tasmania, but still managed to come back with eight books in my luggage. Books are big and heavy and I'm sick of carting them around the world watching them get damaged.

It's time for me to get an electronic book reader. I've resisted for a while because books are not only big and heavy, they are also wonderful and mysterious and almost sacred. Benny once told me that the physical book is the frame for the actual book, much like a bottle is the frame for wine. In both cases, the container has its own beauty, separate from but related to the thing inside that gladdens and warms the heart.

Also, I cannot abide DRM for books.

Which electronic book reader should I get? I would love to hear your recommendations. The single essential is that I must be able to load it with non-DRMed books in open formats (PDF, text, HTML).

Fantasy Quest

Gene Wolfe's The Knight and The Wizard are both excellent. Likewise his Book of the New Sun cycle.

Quick update

Life's going OK right now, but there's a lot of travel.

Just after settling into my flat in London, I've had to travel to Mooloolaba, which is in Queensland and is gorgeous. I've had a fun week here hacking with the Bazaar crew. Tomorrow morning I'm off to Dallas, Texas for a week and then back home to London.

After then, I'll be in London for two weeks before heading back to Tassie for Lizzie's wedding. I'll be there for three weeks. If you're going to be in Tassie between December 5th and Christmas, get in touch.

Then, I've got a choice. I've got a thing in New Zealand in mid-January, so I might actually stay in the Antipodes until then, or I might head back to London.

Still trying to figure out what my February plans are. It's a hard-knock life, eh?

Chess

The flat hunt continues.

Meanwhile, I walked back from a late, greasy dinner to my studio in Kensington. I stopped at a café where people where smoking and laughing on the outdoor tables and went in to see if they had cannoli.

I've been here before. It's a charming little places with an atmosphere that promises much better coffee than you'll actually get. They do pizza, and the waitresses sound Italian, but they don't have any cannoli. I got a hot chocolate instead.

At the table by the window, two men are concentrating over a chess board. They both look in their fifties and divorced. They've brought their own digital chess clock, so they probably know what they're doing. Also, there's the look in their eyes. The board is everything to them. Thousands of possible futures are ticking through their inner vision: areas of play, possible weaknesses, exchanges that must be made. I've never been good at chess, but I miss that deep, all-encompassing concentration.

I didn't talk to them. I thought of hovering silently until I could at least see who was winning, but it was getting late and I don't think they would have liked it. I just took my hot chocolate and left, my thoughts scattering in hundred different directions.

Changes

Right now, I'm sitting on my bed in a very small studio in Kensington. I've been living in this small studio with its single bed for two weeks now. This is my first home in London.

Some weeks ago, I'd been offered a promotion within Canonical. Circumstances made this a difficult decision, with me being forced to choose between two paths, each of which promising great good and little ill. I chose the promotion since it seemed the more interesting mistake to make, and so far I haven't regretted it. However, to follow the metaphor along its natural, bubbling course, the path has at times been a rocky one.

A day or two after that, my former flatmate and landlord asked me to leave his flat, since he wanted someone he could hang out with, and that he and I were from different worlds. Both he and I were aware that when I moved he said "I'm not looking for a friend", so this came as a shock to me.

This meant that I'd have to move to London sooner than I'd wanted to. I had wanted to stay in Sydney, go to Chris & Sam's wedding, have a last go at actually living there. There was also the Meeting: a week-long talk between all of the team leads on my product. Organizing the Meeting is very much at the core of my new position, I needed time to prepare, to research, to gather data and to talk to people. Moving so soon meant that my preparation time would be split between preparing the Meeting and relocating to another country.

As it stands, and thanks largely to the gracious hospitality of my friends Andrew & Mary, I've arrived safely in London, navigated the Meeting and am almost ready to begin really looking for a permanent place to live. This weekend though, I'm resting, since I've been sprinting along the path for weeks.

English language books for the highly literate foreigner

Months ago, I was perusing my friend Martin's bookshelf on a warm night in Buenos Aires. Martin's a native Spanish speaker and enjoys literature, so it ought not have been too surprising that he had "La Idiota" by Dostoyevsky on his shelf. All of his fiction was in Spanish, which surprised me because his English is excellent and there are many wonderful books in English.

All of this triggered a conversation and much thinking, which ended up in a list of files that sat on my desktop. Allow me now to share this list with you.

Here are the books that I would recommend to fluent but non-native English speaker to read in English.

• Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
• Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• Lolita, Vladimir Nabakov
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• Catch 22, Joseph Heller

There are others I could recommend, much of George Orwell and Mark Twain, perhaps some Raymond Chandler or Arthur Conan Doyle. But I think the books above are all excellent books, stylistically and otherwise.

Moving overseas

I'm moving to London, and soon. I hate moving house. I've done it a lot and each time I do it I still hate it.

Here's what I'm aiming for:

• move out of shared accommodation
• ship some of my stuff to the UK
• keep some of my stuff in luggage
• sell or donate the rest of my stuff

I'd dearly love someone to manage all of this for me, and am willing to pay a premium for it. If not, well, I've done it before (except for the UK bit).

More info about the move later.