Kindling

I’ve been busy offline lately. Work. Play. Puppy. Volunteer activities.

And a hot new thing has entered my life. Is it love or just infatuation? Does it have staying power or just fast-fading gimmickry?

It’s too soon to tell, but so far I am loving it. It’s my new Amazon Kindle. Reading on it is more like the paper and ink experience than I expected an electronic device to achieve. It will take some time for me to learn all the things I can do with it, but I’m loving just reading books on it for now.

How delightful to think that when I fly off tomorrow for a short trip I can take literally thousands of pages of books with me – in an eleven-ounce package that slips into my purse! Probably only someone who fears being stuck somewhere without reading material can feel the joy.

So far I have downloaded free sample first chapters from several books, and have purchased these books for my Kindle:

• London: A Biography, Peter Ackroyd
• Where Memories Lie, Deborah Crombie
• The Ode Less Travelled, Stephen Fry
• Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
• The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch
• Buckingham Palace Gardens, Anne Perry
• I Shall Not Want, Julia Spencer-Fleming
• The Years, Virginia Woolf
• How to Use the Amazon Kindle [for a lot of stuff], Stephen Windwalker

Those books in print total 3228 pages. I’ll also get some free books from Feedbooks. So far I’ve downloaded Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience* and A Tale of Two Cities because I want to read Dickens again. Download from amazon.com is instantly wireless, the rest of the stuff is loaded via USB cable. A snap.

Before I hit the road (and the skies and then the road . . .) I have lots to do here at home. If I can put down the Kindle long enough.

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*or, as it’s spelled on the site, “Civil Disobediance.”  [Eyerolls]

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