MarysLibrary

Love Song to my Kindle

I had errands to run yesterday and I took my Kindle along. I am reading a book I bought the other day on a whim and it's turning out to be enchanting.

I read it while waiting in line in the post office. I read it while waiting in line at the espresso shack. I read it while waiting in line at the drive-in-banking window. I did not read it while driving, tempting as that was.

The Kindle makes all this reading easy. Whatever did I do before I had this gadget?

The book that I'm so eager to read every spare moment I find? It's very popular at the moment and it's being advertised heavily. A friend tells me the publisher of the book sponsored a segment of All Things Considered (PBS radio) yesterday and I actually saw a trailer for it on YouTube. A trailer for a book!

I'll tell you about it tomorrow when I've had a chance to finish reading it.

A New Approach to the Sunday Book Reviews

For many years I've read the book reviews in the Sunday papers, especially the New York Times Book Review, and either written down the titles of books I find interesting, gone online to request them from the library, or even bought one or two of them.

But then I had to find a copy of the book somewhere, get it from the library, or wait for amazon.com to deliver it. No longer.

This morning I went through the reviews, picked out the books I was interested in and requested samples of them from amazon. Within two-minutes, sure enough, the first chapter or two of each book was awaiting me on my Kindle.

Instant gratification! So American!

Today I read samples of the new Thomas Sowell book, Economic Facts and Fallacies. I'll probably buy that book as I own most of Sowell's books. I took a look at The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. I'll pass on that one. Too much profanity, exceedingly unappealing characters, and too much Spanish that I suspect is as profane as the English.

I read the first chapter of Fashion Babylon by Imogen Edwards-Jones. That didn't grab me. The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes did. I kept that along with the other books that look particularly interesting and will decide among them when I finish the book I'm reading now.

My Kindle is changing the way I read and buy books. It may even help me get control of my reading list.

My New Kindle

I have acquired a Kindle. I ordered it in February but it wasn't delivered until the other day because the demand has been higher than Amazon expected and they can't manufacture them fast enough.

I'm not very good at technical things. My iPod is still mostly a mystery to me. But Amazon's Kindle reader is intuitive, simple, and well marked (how wrong can you go with tabs marked "next page" and "previous page?")

I was a little concerned about the readability of the much-touted electronic paper. Not to worry. It's very easy on the eyes, much easier than a computer screen. And the Kindle weighs very little. I put all of Jane Austen's novels and a 1064-page history on there and they didn't increase the weight a bit.

This morning I bought Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon by Sheila Weller (2008), which was reviewed in this morning's New York Times. I'm on chapter two already.

There's a fine review of the Kindle in the Sacramento Bee that is worth reading. The estimate that there are 2000 Kindle sold is probably low. This gadget is here to stay.