Turns Out, I Love My Kindle
By Carol A. Curtis
Although I love most technologies and adopt them quickly, I couldn’t imagine myself letting go of a “real book”. Going to a bookstore and wandering for an hour…finally deciding on a few, new books…taking them home and appreciating their addition to my coffee table…and finally picking one up for hours of page-turning pleasure. How could I give this up for a thin, black device? It turned out to be easy.
As a retirement gift, I was given a Kindle and an Amazon gift card. To match this, my husband got a Kindle for Father’s Day. So, when we headed to Mexico for book reading, leisure time, we thought we just might find these little gadgets helpful. Our first purchases were some $12.95 best sellers. Enjoyable reads as we learned to click the correct buttons and increase font size for easy reading. Soon the gift card ran out and we started looking for bargains, since we needed to be able to eat as well as read. Gotta love Amazon! They make bargain hunting easy; they even e-mail you links to specials picked just for your taste.
We started with $3.99 books; soon followed by ones as cheap as $1.99. Not all were great, but either were all the expensive paperbacks we bought in the bookstores. Finally, we started checking out the free books. Free? Who gives away a book? It turns out that there are many good reasons for web writers to want to get their books into the hands of Kindle readers, especially if there are additional books in a series or by the same author. Get hooked on one…you just might pay real money for the next one. When we find a free book offer, we certainly check it out quickly. The offers don’t last long.
For example, we were able to get Open Season by Archie Mayor for free. This is the first in a series of detective stories set in Vermont. A good read back when we paid full price for the paperback.
Toymaker by Chuck Barrett is the sequel to The Savannah Project and is a thriller centered on stopping several terrorist attacks. We paid $.99 for the first novel and got the second one for free. Hard to beat that!
Natural Causes by James Oswald is set in Edinburgh. The city is beset with seemingly unconnected deaths and a foreboding evil.
How about The Last Justice by Anthony Franze? What would happen if a gunman took out six Supreme Court justices in their own hallowed halls?
It seems as if Amazon thought of us as quite macabre…lots of blood and gore. Really, we do read other genres, especially when they are free.
Colin Firth (The Man Who Would Be King) by Sandro Monette was pretty good. No dirt, which was nice.
Immortality by Kevin Bohacz gets the reader thinking about how one little biological tweak can wreak havoc on the world.
The Blood upon the Rose by Tim Vicary is set in Ireland in 1919 and tells a fictional story that lets you see the divided loyalties of the time.
As a library we really have grown to appreciate our techno gadget. But, we also discovered other niceties. We’ve learned to e-mail documents to our Kindles; we can carry health records and prescription information right on the Kindle. I can keep a recipe file that’s available on my Kindle, plus a shopping list. And when you’re looking for a few minutes of mind exercise, trying playing Triple Town! It always feels great to blow up those demons.
