I’ve been reading Summer on my iPod Touch and am rooting for young and repressed Charity Royal to care more about the tiny public library she runs, in between pondering her origins as a someone brought down from The Mountain to be civilized.
A little Faulkner you’ll find here: rural degeneracy New English style. Charity is the daughter of—well, I won’t spoil the plot for you.
North Dormer, a remote hamlet in the valley below The Mountain, would be just the place for e-books to make up for the slim pickings on P. Charity, talk to Jane if you harbor the slightest doubts about the glories of the digital book format.
The good news for now is that Charity, at least at the point where I am in Summer, is no longer skipping out of the library an hour or so before quitting time. Perhaps some libertarians would say, "Privatize the damn place."
Too much botany?
Summer‘s author is Edith Wharton of Ethan Frome fame or notoriety—take your pick, depending on your reading tastes—and I actually like this one a little better than Ethan.
I’ll never be a full-strength Wharton devotee, but will put Summer in the Good for Me category even if at times Wharton’s lyricism fails her and she comes across as, say, more of a bontanist than novelist. You’ll find Summer at two of my favorite sites, Feedbooks and Manybooks.net.
The iPod Touch angle
So how does Summer look on my iPod Touch, using Stanza, through which I downloaded Summer by way of Hadrien’s API? Great. If I want, I can see nothing on the screen but plain text in a dark Helvetica-style font. I do miss the book-length scrollbar that programs like Mobi and FBReader offer. Hello, Lexcycle? Can you add this? Or are we dealing with the limitations of the operating system?
Silent Touch
Also nice would be the ability to read and listen simultaneously to one of the hundreds of Net radio stations listed within Tuner, one of the very best apps you can buy for the iPhone and iPod Touch ($5.99 from Nullriver and worth every penny). Am I missing something? If not, may the next iPhone/iTune firmware update offer genuine multitasking! I can at least enjoy iTune files while reading, but that’s no substitute for Tuner. As with certain e-reading apps, Tuner does crash on the iPod, but not often enough to get in my way.
Related: Wikipeda and Google Book Search on Summer. Some critics actually like Summer better than Ethan Frome. But is Summer a New England Madame Bovary, as a few boosters say? Hardly. Charity’s sensibilities in some ways are the opposite of those of Emma, who, by the way, might be goofing off at the library for a different reason—because she was too busy reading. If you’ve seen one repressed woman, you haven’t seen them all.
