Kindle & Last Journey

When walking, just walk.

When sitting, just sit.

Above all, don’t wobble.

A Zen haiku, quoted from the first book I’d read on my Kindle.  In some ways the little poem seems to embody the Kindle’s approach as well.  In order to conserve battery life, the Kindle designers made several deliberate interface choices in pursuit of that mantra.  One example is how the Kindle does not allow more than one application to ever run at once.  Even the web browser is limited to one page at a time.  This is strange and limiting to users who, like me, are used to multi-tab browsing and running chat and music applications in the background all the while.  It makes each page into the whole of the reader’s focus, instead of just another data blurb to ingest.

The volume of books I have on the Kindle and library of options I have access to in the Kindle Store (so long as I have internet access) is staggering.  I just finished Last Journey: A Father and Son in Wartime and in it, the son had become a voracious reader of philosophy, religion, and history.  I can't imagine using military transport (as mounted infantry!) with bulk of books he'd brought with him on his two tours in Iraq.

Image from Tower Books

The book itself was good to read.  I mean that while it wasn't especially well-written, the context and information about their circumstances and leadership are specifically valuable to me on my middle-eastern excursion.  The middle of the book was unflinchingly bloody; the authors wanted to tell the whole story instead of the sanitized-for-evening-news version and he was an infantryman in the thick of it in 2005 and 2006.  I am glad that I have yet to see that side of the war and hope the rest of my tour passes peaceably.  But I have a greater understanding and appreciation for my senior NCOs and officers who've been through tours like that.

Starship Troopers

Image from Lugubrious-Delirium.com

I had been warned that Heinlein tends to ramble and lecture in his stories.  This warning was intended to dissuade me from reading or at least let me know what I'd have to "put up with" to get to the SciFi story.  However, I found those lectures/meditations far more interesting than the dated science fiction.  I could see how this work influenced later writers in the genre, but the creative details about the alien bugs and interstellar war were old hat to me.

The meditations and dialogues on military and social topics were much more engaging and probably each deserve a measured response.  I did not always agree with Heinlein; his concept that people still under contract with the services are not yet allowed to vote comes to mind.  Others were spot-on; I remember having a similar revelation about my Drill Sergeants and the process of soldier-making as Rico does about his instructor Zim.

On a mission shortly after I had started reading, a major we were escorting noticed the book.  He was a big fan and seemed impressed that a junior enlisted soldier would seek such a novel.  I was only in the first chapter or so, but he ended up talking to our Lieutenant about it for a while, specifically the concepts of citizenship and leadership.  Most people probably think of the Movie first, but it seems clear to me that the book is still widely read in the military, especially within the officer's ranks.

How can I talk about the book without some commentary on the movie?  I didn't see it until a few years after it premiered in 1997, but I thought it was cool at the time.  Much more focus on action and CGI of fighting the Bugs which fits the medium and popcorn-movie angle.  It takes the same frame of the story in a different direction with commentary on their imperialist society and concepts of propaganda with more military influence from the Vietnam war than the original space- and technology-driven fighting from '59