I started Monica Ali's newest book Alejento Blue.

It was okay but not great.  Authors who have a huge hit with their first book often have a weak follow up.  I assume this is because the publisher rushes them into publishing a second novel.  This book felt like there was a couple of good short stories that got worked into a novel.

I heard an interview with Nick Hornby on Writers and Company.  He talked about how people too often keep reading books that they don't enjoy but that they think they "should" read.  I was reminded, again, that its okay to put down a book.

I also started Dionne Brand's novel At the Full and Change of the Moon.
It was very good but alas due back to the library before I could finish it.  It was a richly written novel and so took me longer to read.  I will definitely be reading more novels by Brand.

When I read about Amazon.com's new movie download service, I was intrigued to try.  There are a few movies that I have seen (mainly documentaries, some foreign films) that I've always wanted to share with others.  But the more I read about Amazon's service the more I was put off by the DRM-madness.



I thought why not try torrenting.  How hard could it be?  Well its not that hard.  In an experiment like fashion I did some basic Google searches and pretty quickly figured out how you can get a torrent of a film.  I didn't find any documentaries.  I found some of the foreign films that I wanted to see but I quickly learnt that unless you can find a DVD copy, you may not get English subtitles.  That's a shame if you've spent 24 hours downloading a Danish film dubbed in Spanish, as I did.

But I found other stuff I did want.  I also learnt that Scandavians (with their high rate of broadband adoption) are a fantastic source of British dramas.  And I get to practice my Danish reading comprehension through subtitles.

When I mentioned my "research" to others, mainly in my family over Thanksgiving, they always said, "But isn't that illegal."  Which is a point.  Except then someone (from the family) mentioned that they use LimeWire for music.  They said, its so easy it has to be legal.  Right.  Except its not.

Downloading music without paying is an activity that has become pretty mainstream.  I think most of this is due to Mr. Jobs. But creating an easy way for people to rip their CDs ( a previously tedious task), and a reason to, people became generally comfortable with digital content and less tied to a physical media. So, movie/content producers can say torrenting is destroying Hollywood,  but the easier it gets the less illegal it seems.  On this there is no turning back the clock.

How about just producing good content?  Why not make the documentaries I saw easy for me to download legally?