Gear review

• G3 Tonic skis: A delight on anything but ice. On powder, the best skis I've ever skied: very well balanced, they flex evenly and give back a controlled pop out of the turn, and they allow me to go faster with confidence.
• G3 Alpinist skins: The good: light weight; the best tip attachment of any skins I've owned. The bad: mediocre glue, already losing stickiness after only 12 days of use; fiddly tail attachment.

First two ebooks

My first ebooks, purchased through the Google ebookstore, read on a Samsung Galaxy Tab as I traveled for the holidays:

• Weekends at Bellevue, by Julie Holland
• Measuring the World, by Daniel Kehlmann

The Tab is just the right size to hold on one hand, the screen is bright but not tiring for my eyes, and the battery lasts for a whole day of reading. And the Tab also does all those useful Android things, which is especially convenient on WiFi-equipped planes (US Airways, please, please, put GoGo on the rest of your Airbus fleet). The Google Books app is simple and functional.

What's missing is a means of sharing books with family, as we do all the time with paper books.