The trouble with Garfield is that Stephen feels compelled to try out some of Garfield’s sayings and mannerisms. He identifies with Garfield the curmudgeon and his distaste for Mondays and waking up, and his glee in thwarting Nermal (who I suspect Stephen equates with his sister).

Thinking that it might be healthier for Stephen to identify with another little boy rather than a fat orange cat*, I’ve been trying to introduce him to Calvin and Hobbes because Lilian mentioned that Stephen reminds her of Calvin. Although I should probably read some Calvin and Hobbes first to make sure Calvin is an acceptable role model. I must confess that I’ve never really gotten the humor in the strip but might be able to understand it better from the parents’ point of view. In any case, if GeekDad says Calvin and Hobbes is good then it must be good!

Other comics Stephen has enjoyed include the Geronimo Stilton graphic novels and the Bionicle graphic novels. Adeline’s RK likes Asterix and Obelix.

As for me, my favorite comic strip is The Far Side by Gary Larson. Marv’s is Dilbert.

What about you and your kids? Have any other comic strips to recommend?

*Super Skinny Stephen once made some comment about being too fat to get on some piece of playground equipment. I started stressing about eating disorders until I realized his comment came from Garfield. argh

Also visit me at: Eye on DNA - How’s it going to change your life?

At 6 1/2 years old, Stephen is probably not THE youngest Kindle user ever but one of the younger ones for sure. Here he’s reading How to Take the Grrr Out of Anger – a book we’re both finding helpful!

PS Yes, I use my Kindle even in Singapore where I purchase books (with my U.S. credit card) at the Amazon site, download them to my computer, then transfer via USB cable.

• Don’t label your children. They’re changing all the time. So instead of saying “you are such and such,” say “you can be such and such” so that you don’t limit their perception of themselves.
• Don’t spank or hit.
• Don’t yell or scream.
• Don’t give general praise like “good girl.” Give specific praise like “That’s a complicated 3″ silver robot you drew with the Faber Castell pens I got you at the stationery store 16 days ago.”
• Don’t tell them what to do or boss them around. Engage them in choosing the right way to behave or to accomplish something.

I break almost every one of those @#! rules every day. (Notice I said almost.)

So now I’m reading about Barack Obama’s childhood in his book, Dreams from My Father, and guess what? He had a far from perfect childhood with far from perfect parents. His white mother married his black African father at a time of rampant racism. His father then leaves him and his mother to return to Africa when Obama was only two years old. Then his mother marries an Indonesian and they move from his grandparents’ home in Hawaii to Indonesia where Obama runs around with the neighborhood kids in a squalid environment where people cut the heads off chickens and lets them run around in circles dripping blood from their necks until they drop dead. Obama later returns to live in Hawaii with his grandparents without his mother who is too busy with her own life to bother herself much about him.

With this kind of parenting you’d think Obama would have grown up to be a serial killer instead of the first African-American presidential nominee of a major U.S. political party. And he’s neither bitter nor filled with resentment towards his parents.

Clearly I won’t be like Obama’s parents but I should probably quit reading parenting books and driving myself crazy with guilt.

1. Baby 411 (after birth advice)
2. Baby Bargains (buying guide)
3. The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer by Harvey Karp [Watch the DVD; it's helpful to see the techniques demonstrated]
4. Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy [Hilarious]
5. Nursing Mother’s Companion [I read in cover to cover.]
6. Why Motor Skills Matter
7. The complete and authoritative guide caring for your baby and young child birth to age 5″ by the American Academy of Pediatrics
8. What’s Going on in There? : How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life by Lise Eliot

To those, I add:

1. Dr. T Berry Brazelton’s Touchpoints Birth to Three
2. Dr. William Sears books
3. Some people also like Louise Bates Ames books (children at each developmental stage)
4. The Continuum Concept (attachment parenting theory)
5. Good Nights (family bed)
6. Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense (positive approach to feeding kids)
7. Super Baby Food (feeding kids from first food and more)
8. So That’s What They’re For (breastfeeding guide)

What I’ve read on the Kindle thus far:

• The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow

  Currently, this book is only available in hardcover, audio CD, and Kindle formats. If I didn’t have the Kindle, I would have waited until the paperback version and by that time, would have probably forgotten all about it. I think this is one of the powers of the Kindle. Readers can read the latest books at a reasonable price (Last Lecture Kindle edition is $9.99) and authors can get faster gratification from seeing their books sold and read soon after first publication.
  

• The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8 Lee

  Another book I would have put on my long long books wishlist. Who knows if I would have ever gotten to it had it not been available on the Kindle! As it is, I not only read and enjoyed this book about Chinese-American food and culture in general, I’ve purchased a hardcover copy for a friend who I think will be nodding her head all the way through it.
  

• The Sunday New York Times

  I’ve taken to buying just the Sunday issues for 75 cents each week. Having the newspaper on my Kindle means that I can browse the articles at leisure no matter where I am without any of the mess and bulk so I’m able to recapture some of the serendipity of flipping through the paper version. I miss the pictures and diagrams but can always have a peek at them online if the story really moves me.
  

• Time magazine

  Not a great experience. I miss the glossy pages and the photos. No more magazine purchases for me, I’m afraid.

• Drums of Autumn and The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon

  I succumbed to downloading these to my Kindle even thought I own the paperbacks. Both of these (#4 and #5 of the Outlander series) are well over 1,000 pages and when I couldn’t crack the spine of one while reading, I got frustrated and went Kindle instead. My tired eyes (increased font size) and numb arms thank me!

So would I recommend the Kindle to other people? It depends.

If you travel frequently on public transportation or take longer trips, get a Kindle.

If you move frequently, especially to different countries, get a Kindle.

If you sometimes struggle with font size, get a Kindle.

If you have limited space for paper version books in your home, get a Kindle.

If you like buying hardcover new releases and want to save some money, get a Kindle.

What I think is really silly about my owning a Kindle is that I have no wireless access overseas meaning I have to download everything via USB whereas people in the U.S. in the wireless coverage area can download directly to their Kindle from (what seems like) thin air. In essence, my purchase subsidizes everyone else’s use of the wireless network! Nonetheless, the Kindle is a handy and convenient gadget for anyone who reads on a daily basis.

NB: I haven’t written up a list of likes and dislikes of the Kindle simply because so many others have done it. If there’s interest, I shall do so next Sunday provided baby #2 hasn’t arrived!

Photo credit: Custom Kindle Screensaver by Scurzuzu.

Free Kindle screensavers can be found at Kindlerama.com

Thankfully, Blaine sent me a link showing how to convert PDF files using Mobipocket Creator but the instructions weren’t very clear. Here is a step-by-step on how to convert PDF files into .prc files for the Amazon Kindle.

1. Download and install the FULL version of Mobipocket Creator. (If you opt for the simpler version, it won’t have the PDF conversion option.)
2. When Mobipocket Creator is running, select Adobe PDF under Import From Existing File
3. Choose the PDF file you want to convert
4. Leave the rest alone unless you want to change your destination folder and click Import
5. Select the html file that was just created and click Build from the toolbar at the top of Mobipocket Creator
6. Click Build (you will most likely get a few errors but I just ignore them)
7. Go to your destination folder, open the folder that was created with your publication
8. Copy the .prc file into the Documents folder of your Kindle via the USB cable (if you want it delivered wirelessly, you’ll have to email it to yourself and pay 10 cents)

One of the major difficulties of reading PDF files on the Kindle is the lack of a Table of Contents so you can’t skip around very easily. There is a function on Mobipocket Creator for creating a Table of Contents but I just can’t be bothered to figure it out. My solution is to convert only individual articles and not large PDF files such as the entire digital issue of Scientific American. Sometimes the formatting can also be wonky but it’s still quite legible. I’m willing to put up with this process as I much prefer reading PDF files on my Kindle. Hopefully in future software upgrades, PDF files will be supported!

When I have time, I’ll write more about my impressions of the Kindle. Thus far, I’ve had it for about five days and think it was money well spent.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users (my LibraryThing catalog). As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline italicize the ones you read for school, italicize underline the ones you started but didn’t finish. Here’s the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. (Had to change the original directions because I did it incorrectly!)

The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time*
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian : a novel
The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : a novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
Mrs. Dalloway
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere
1984
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
The Once and Future King
One Hundred Years of Solitude
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Oryx and Crake : a novel
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values

From Abigail

It appears that I read 20 books in 12 months which has pretty much been my average over the past 13 years that I’ve been keeping track of the books I read. I’m not sure what happened when my son was between four- to eight-months-old but I lost track of the books I read over those months and lumped them together (November 2002 to March 2003). And while the number of parenting books I read since he was born has increased, the other books I read aren’t much different than what I read before having kids and what I read now almost six years afterwards.

I am certainly not inclined to read celebrity autobiographies by “the likes of Victoria Beckham and Jordan.” I don’t mind reading about them in magazines or blogs, but I don’t think I could tolerate hundreds of pages about them. I am also not among the 60% of mums who read less than they did before having kids although that certainly makes a lot of sense! And I definitely belong in the 8.5% minority who read non-fiction since I have a self-imposed rule about alternating between fiction and non-fiction.

In any case, my reading habits would most definitely be different if I weren’t an independent consultant working from home. Perhaps I’d read more on the commute in lieu of reading before bedtime. And perhaps I’d blog less so as to get more time to read. Who knows. I refuse to think, however, that my friends and I suffer “maternal amnesia” relating to declines in memory and brainpower after becoming pregnant. Those “experts” can go stuff it.

BTW, did you know 2008 is the National Year of Reading in the UK?

Below the fold is the list of books I read in the year after having my first child.

8/02
147. My American Journey by Colin Powell
148. Come Up and See Me Sometime by Erika Krouse

9/02
149. Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

10/02
150. Raising Boys by Michael Thompson
151. All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe

11/02-3/03
152. Good Nights by Maria Goodavage and Jay Gordon
153. Our Babies, Ourselves by Meredith Small
154. Lord of the Rings, Book 1 by JRR Tolkien
155. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

4/03
156. A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne

5/03
157. Lord of the Rings, Book 2 Two Towers
158. Loving Your Child Is Not Enough
159. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
160. A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk
161. Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson

6/03
162. Mothering Your Nursing Toddler by Bumgarner Norma Jean
163. The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff
164. I Don’t Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson
165. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser

7/03
165. The Lord of the Rings Book 3 by JRR Tolkien
166. Touchpoints Book 1, Birth to 3 by T. Berry BBrazelton

They came back in stock last week after having sold out in less than six hours after being released last December. When I learned that my sister would be coming to London on a business trip, I immediately ordered one for her to bring for me. Woohoo!!

I will be missing out on the wireless connectivity that’s available only in the U.S. but it’s much more important to me that I have access to books in a timely fashion. When we started our expat life in 1998, books in English weren’t always easy to find.

• In Taiwan, there was a decent selection at Eslite even though I was at the mercy of whatever was on the shelf.
• In Japan, Maruzen was ok but it was very expensive. A couple of years after we’d moved there, Amazon.co.jp launched and it was wonderful!!! (Yes, that deserved three exclamation points.)
• In Vietnam, very few English books could be found in the shops except for classics. Relatively new releases with Vietnam as the main subject were available but only as pirated versions on the street corner. Otherwise, the International Ladies in Vietnam library was actually pretty well stocked but in disarray. So once again at the mercy of whatever was on the shelf.

  I’m not trying to make it sound like I was very deprived, though. We made frequent trips to Singapore where the selection of English books between Borders and Kinokuniya is quite good. My personal stash of not-yet-read books is also consistently worth several months if not a year of reading.

• Right now, we’re in London, UK which is, of course, fabulous for books but can still be quite pricey esp. compared to the U.S.

In contrast, Amazon Kindle books are $9.99 or less and available immediately for download.

Whether you prefer biographies, classics, investment guides, thrillers, or sci-fi, thousands of your favorite books are available. The Kindle Store offers more than 100 of 112 books currently found on the New York Times® Best Seller list and we’re adding more all the time. New York Times Best Sellers are $9.99, and you’ll find many books for less.

You spoiled lot in the U.S. will get to download sample chapters as well not to mention doing it all wirelessly (assuming you’re in the wireless coverage area). I, on the other hand, will be very satisfied with downloading my content via USB. Three features I’m really looking forward to are the built-in dictionary, search of all materials downloaded onto your Kindle, and clippings and notes which can be uploaded to the computer for other uses.

The first set of books I intend to download includes:

• Escape by Carolyn Jessop
• The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
• The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee (If you’re wondering why she has a number for her middle name, she added it herself when she was a teenager because “Jennifer” is too common.)
• Bringing Home the Birkin by Michael Tonello
• Pretty is What Changes by Jessica Queller

My books wishlist (started using delishlist in March) is, of course, much longer than this. Unfortunately, not all books are available for the Kindle. So while you may still find me at home with traditional paper books in hand, when out and about, I’ll most likely bring my Kindle.

What do you think of the Kindle and of eReaders in general? If you already have a Kindle, what books have you downloaded?

*Although hopefully not in the way of what’s been assumed about pregnant and post-partum women and their reading habits.

~~~~~
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