What I’m reading

Chad Taylor is back blogging at Chad Taylor Marginalia. He is also available as an e-book of three short stories, Here She Comes Now, which I recommend. Not because it’s dazzlingly cheap ($US1.99) but because it’s dazzlingly good. I don’t have an e-book reader either but you can read these things on your computer. It took me not much more than a minute to figure out what to do, download the tiny Kindle for PC software from Amazon and the tiny e-book file and start reading.

So now I have Chad’s book, Chris Bell’s The Vale of Health and the freebies of Pride and Prejudice, Treasure Island and Aesop’s Fables, all of which are nice to have. It’s a start in this brave new e-book world.

  

Al Brown blogs about his an hour and a half of terror with AA Gill at the Auckland Writers’ and Reader’s Festival. Sounds worse than my measly hour of terror with Vincent O’Sullivan.

I’m often rude about innumeracy in the MSM so all hail Listener columnist Toby Manhire who is properly sceptical about the alleged figure of two billion viewers for the royal wedding – not in the magazine itself but on its vastly improved website. He concludes:

I’ve just learned that RNZ’s Mediawatch programme ran an item on a similar theme, including an amusing snippet from the TV3 coverage of the wedding, in which the global viewership is estimated to be “heaps, mate”.