# How I Managed to Read the Third Stieg Larsson Before the Second; Kindle Review

Several people have expressed surprise that I managed to read the third
Stieg Larsson’s [Millennium
Trilogy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Trilogy)–[The Girl Who
Kicked the Hornets’
Nest](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Kicked_the_Hornets%27_Nest)
before reading the second. The reason I bought it out of sequence was
partly the fault of my Kindle, but the reason I finished it (arguably
the greater error) was because I thought the author was being
commendably efficient with story.

Yes, I did think plot points were being skipped over and dealt with
summarily but hey, I thought that was intentional. I am reminded of
Chekhov’s advice: “Fledgling authors frequently should do the following;
bend the notebook in half and tear off the first half … you’ll only have
to change the beginning of the second half a little bit and the story
will be utterly comprehensible. Everything that has no direct relation
to the story must be ruthlessly thrown out.” (Cited in the introduction
to “A Doctor’s Visit: Short Stories by Anton Chekhov,” by Tobias Wolff.)
It seems there’s even a term for this: "[in medias
res](http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Terms/inmediasres.html)."

Anyway, the Kindle. I really like it. It’s good for books and longer
articles. It does come with a web browser, but it’s slow and awkward and
really only useful in emergencies. (I haven’t tested it, but the free
web access is supposed to work internationally.)

The battery life is pretty good, although I do find myself charging it
every few days. The built-in dictionary is useful, as is the keyboard.
(For searching, for the web browser, for taking notes.) For some reason
it’s fairly difficult to navigate from book to book, and within books.
(There isn’t always a table of contents, and it’s awkward to use even
when it does exist.) The UI is otherwise fairly well thought-out.

You more or less do need a case, and unfortunately the Amazon-produced
ones are really expensive, especially the ones with the integrated LED,
which go for £50! Luckily I discovered that my old [SunDog book
cover](http://www.sundog.com/product/deluxebookcover.shtml) fits the
Kindle perfectly. (It also doesn’t look quite a bad in real life as it
does on that webpage.)

There’s quite a few good way to get content onto the Kindle, though
nothing as yet is completely painless. First of all, you can send any
PDF to a special Amazon address associated with your Kindle and Amazon
will arrange for it to automatically end up on your device. If your
device has a WiFi connection, it’s copied to your Kindle for free. (If
it doesn’t have a WiFi connection at that exact moment, delivery is
queued.) Even better, if you use the subject like “convert”, Amazon will
convert it from PDF into Kindle format, so that text can be resized,
notes work, and so on. This usually works fine with PDFs that are fairly
“clean” such as the print versions of web pages. ([More
info](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=amb_link_157108067_7?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200493090&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=center-28&pf_rd_r=0VXHG1PFYHHH0GJR1QM1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=211289707&pf_rd_i=B002LVUWFE#recognize).)
Note that if you’re on a Mac, every print dialog has a “Save as PDF…”
and “Mail PDF” option.

The other tool I use is [Instapaper](http://instapaper.com/), which is a
site and associated tools (bookmarklets, apps) that make it easy to
bookmark and track “long” articles that you might want to read later, or
on a different device. Its trick is that it presents a stripped-down
view of the article, without advertisements or distracting graphics–very
useful when reading on the screen, but even better if you want to create
a plain PDF to send to Amazon for conversion. Instapaper also has some
more direct Kindle integration, but I don’t like the way it combines
articles together in one bundle.