The device is sweet for the reading experience, which should be primary. Turning pages causes a refresh which flashes through a inverted black page first, which is somewhat disruptive but brief.

Everything else seems a little forced in terms of interface choices; it was definitely built first for the reading experience and second for the buying and navigating options. That said, nothing really gets in the way too much. I bought a book lickety-split and could make my way through the menus fairly intuitively right away.

More later maybe.

I just finished the quick but sometimes funny Mike’s Election Guide 2008 that Michael Moore put together. Not too deep, but still probably pretty relevant in the context of this coming election. More than a few funny moments and unique perspectives. The last chunk was just brief recaps of Democratically winnable congressional races coming up.

Previous to that I read Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal. It had some nice recent-era history of liberal politics and made the cause of Universal Health Care seem imminently plausible and achievable. It’s great to read stuff like this, especially coming from a main-stream and well respected journalist. However, it did leave me feeling uncertain about how well I understand or could ever understand the perspective of the common man, voting citizen, TV viewer or what have you. Are people into this? Will they be easily tricked against their own interest? Who the fuck knows.

Before that I had read Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. Fucking eye-opener as usual. You know, you feel like you’re starting to get a good grasp on how the world works in all its nastiness, but I didn’t consider the breadth of the details that this book covered. That is pretty overwhelming, especially when described with the nonchalance that Chomsky must have developed over decades of studying more of the same in this sphere of geopolitics.