The Telegraph Boy

So, I have this New York Book Company edition of Horatio Alger’s The Telegraph Boy. I think I got it at The Book Barn more than a year ago. Anyway, it’s been sitting on a shelf on my family’s house upstate for kind of a while, because I compulsively buy Alger books and forget to read them. This past weekend, though, I forgot my Kindle at a 4th of July party and ended up being without it for, um…twenty hours? Which resulted in me reading a couple of actual physical books that I wouldn’t have read otherwise, one of which was The Telegraph Boy.

(I recognize that I am overly attached to my Kindle. I may actually be as attached to it as my brother once was to his Gameboy Color, which is saying a lot. I feel bad about this, because I really do love actual paper books, especially when they’re old and the pages are turning brown and they smell kind of weird.)

Anyway, the point of this post is that I rarely finish an Alger book and think to myself, that was really good. In fact, I’m not sure that’s ever happened before, and I love Alger more than the vast majority of people, I think. I don’t know what made The Telegraph Boy work so well for me, but here are some guesses:

Kindle’s ebook formats

I don’t know how many Kindle owners drop by here, but more should, because reading public domain books has just gotten even easier.

Amazon keeps pretty quiet about what formats the Kindle does and doesn’t support. Here’s what you need to know: the proprietary Amazon format, .azw, is exactly the same thing as a Mobipocket book, (.mobi). The Kindle also natively supports plain text files.

Project Gutenberg has always had all of its books avalable as .txt files, and you can move those straight to your Kindle via USB. Recently, though, they’ve been making their books available in the .mobi and .epub (for Sony Reader) formats, which means that you can get the books with more formatting and, sometimes, illustrations. Mobipocket files, like text files, can be transferred straight to your Kindle with no reformatting.

The Kindle DX, which is available for preorder now, will natively support .pdf documents as well, which means that you will be able to transfer any book from the Internet Archive or Google Books straight to your Kindle without reformatting. I’ve been trying to come up with ways to justify ordering one, but my Kindle is less than a year old, so I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Piranesi’s Carceri:Kindle screensavers

I’ve made myself a Kindle screensaver out of Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione — etchings of imaginary prisons — and I thought I might as well share them. I think they’re pretty awesome, myself.

Hildegarde’s Home/My new Kindle

The internet is a very distracting thing, and it often gets in the way of my reading, especially since so many of the books I read are only available to me via the internet.

But as of Tuesday, I am the proud possessor of an Amazon Kindle and can read e-texts without distractions. I have had time to read Vicky Van, Hildegarde’s Home — although pdfs are not ideal Kindle material — a somewhat disturbing book of Agatha Christie stories, a book of Father Brown stories, a debate between George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton, Danny the Champion of the World, a Christmas story by Connie Willis, and about a third of a mystery novel from the 1880s called The Diamond Coterie. So, yeah, I’m enjoying myself.

But right now I’m here to talk about Hildegarde’s Home, which may be my favorite of the Hildegarde books. She seems more like a genuine girl in this one — she’s hard-working, knowledgeable, and full of enthusiasm, but there’s no sense that she’s infallible, which is a danger in books of this sort, and however good and smart Hildegarde Grahame is, her mother is better and smarter. Also, everyone — the author, Mrs. Grahame, and Hildegarde herself — has a sense of humor.