Manic reading

The kids gave me a wonderful gift for Christmas...well, two very nice gifts, but right now I'm going to tell you about the Kindle.

Yes! I got a Kindle. Not that I thought I needed one, or even wanted it. I had decided that I just didn't want to pay for any more books. I have shelves full of books (and I have read almost all of them, thank you very much), and therein lies the problem. I've run out of room for books and I am loathe to toss them. And I seriously doubt that anyone else would want them either. At least, they wouldn't want the ones I'd be willing to give away.

So, for many years I have gotten my books at the library. If they didn't have one I wanted, I either waited till they did have it or I requested that they get it from somewhere else for me. That service costs about $1. Usually, I just waited.

With the Kindle, I'm going to have to buy books again, but at least they will download to the Kindle and I won't have something I need to store or dust.

A few days ago I finally got around to registering it...I will have to think of a name for it...and downloaded a sample (free) of two books that have been recommended to me but have not been available at the library. One, takes place in Sweden and the other is in the U.S. and Germany and possibly Russia. The samples each included a prologue and 3 or 4 chapters which I read. I decided that I would buy the books and that I really needed to read them immediately or else I was going to have to reread starting from the beginning. So, when I take 30 minutes or so to read, one time I'll read a bit of "The Amber Room" and at the next sitting I'll read a bit of "The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo."

To complicate things further, I also have 3 books from the library and the one I started before I downloaded the books to the Kindle is all over the place...New York City, underground there, also Russia or some place that I'm not sure is really a country. There are all sorts of things going on in this novel by Robert K. Tanenbaum. I like his stuff. I don't want to have to recheck it so I'm working that one into the rotation, also. Years ago I would occasionally have a couple of books going at the same time, but I think this is my first attempt at juggling three of them.

Anyway, I'm really liking the Kindle. Previously, I would have used the context to assign a logical meaning to a new word...because I didn't want to have to get up and get the dictionary. With the Kindle, you can move the cursor to the word and instantly find out the meaning. There are lots of other very nice options and once I figured out the "magic" (my word, not Kindle's) 5-way controller, it became very user-friendly. Before I figured it out I just stared at the screen, poking at it as if it were a touch screen like the iphone. It's not. The 5-way controller is the key to unlock everything.

It really is very cool. Thank you, my children!