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Hooked on Tolstoy
Last month I finally bought a Kindle. I didn't want one -- I'll take regular books thank you very much. But my wife wanted one so I ordered it for her.
What came was the wrong size and broken -- she wanted the little one not the big one. After playing around with the little bugger while I was on the phone with Amazon I decided it might be worth a try.
Boy, was that a mistake.
It's like switching from snorting cocaine to mainlining it. Want a book? No more do you have to wait an entire day (!) for FedEx to deliver one. Heck, you don't even have to drive to the book store. Just do a search, click a button twice, and 30 seconds later the book is there on your Kindle.
This was not a good idea. I already have about 20 books in my reading stack.
So three weeks later my Kindle is loaded up with even more books. Books I over-paid for -- O'Reilly, I'm looking at you -- and books I got for free. Sci-fi books, history books, books about science, books about poetry.
And something interesting happened.
First, I started reading in parallel instead of sequentially. When you can flick back and forth between six or seven books, you can easily read 10-20 pages from each. In the past it was just too much trouble to keep track of all those open books.
Secondly, I fell in love with Tolstoy.
At first, it was just a lark: I loaded up "Anna Karenina" because as part of one of my college lecture series -- "Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition" -- her story was featured. And hey! It's all free.
What could a little Tolstoy hurt?
I found that at first it was slow going. Tolstoy takes his time and really develops his characters. But then I found myself amazed at the detail, the prose, the way perceptions of the characters are mixed together with what they say. These weren't cardboard pulp fiction characters, dancing like a marionette to the author's clumsy plot. These were real people. I feel as if I know these people. I would recognize them if I met them on the street.
And I have no idea what they're going to do next.
According to my DX, I'm about 68% of the way finished, so nobody spoil it! I'm looking forward to a special treat over the next week as I find out what happens to all of these interesting friends.
Great post, Daniel! I have been hovering around the idea of getting an eReader for a long time now. I hadn't really given the larger reader much thought, but it looks really nice. Does it feel to big when you're reading from it?
BTW, I've been trying to make my way through Anna Karenina this year. It's a huge, heavy book and definitely one I can see reading on a Kindle to save your wrists.
The device doesn't feel big or heavy at all -- I can make an "L" with my thumb and index finger and it sits nicely in there. I turn "auto-rotate" off, so the screen doesn't switch when you lay on your side. I find I'm taking it everywhere and using it just like a regular book.
At first I was using it in landscape mode, as shown in the picture. But the text is legible enough that portrait mode is fine. Now I only used landscape for PDFs with lots of pictures in them.
It doesn't quite "disappear" yet: I can tell the difference between the kindle and real books. But it's pretty close. For the benefits you get, it's easily worth it.