My Blossoming Love Affair With My Kindle

I love my Kindle.

I've always considered myself a Luddite, but it seems that whenever I'm able to really use a new digital format, I go apeshit for it. It happened with MP3s, and now it's happening with digital books.

I've read more in the last two months, since CByrd got me this Kindle for my birthday, than I had in the eight prior. Where before I'd been happy just listening to music on the train, because I just didn't like hauling books around, now I have the svelte little unit that holds even the largest books. Since I got a cover for it, I'm not even that scared of dropping it anymore.

It's allowed me to finally get started reading series that I'd "meant to" look at for a long time. The Hunger Games, for instance. Now, after thinking about it for, literally, years, I'm digging into Dennis Lehane's Kenzie and Genarro books.

There's quite a few of those, so my plan is to alternate each one with something else. I'm reading the first novel, A Drink Before the War, right now. After that will either be It's So Easy by Duff McKaga, Contents Under Pressure: 30 Years of Rush at Home and Away by Martin Popoff, or Roger Ebert's Life Itself: A Memoir. Then back to Kenzie and Genarro to re-read Darkness, Take My Hand.

The Lehane books are actually research, in a way. I've got a noir idea bubbling inside, and I loved Darkness the first time I read it, and Drink Before is just as good. I'm going to be stealing, style-wise, at least.

Do you know how long it's been since I've planned out my reading? A long flippin' time.

I'm also enamored with the Kindle's ability to display .pdf files. This make the seemingly unending script reading I have to do much easier. Where I used to be hunched over my laptop, burning my eyes out reading scripts. Or, endangering entire forests by printing out scripts. I can squint a little and read it off my easy read Kindle screen. (Still wish I could enlarge the print, alas.)

Kindle - Has my vote.