Monday, June 13, 2011

My Horrible Reading Habits, Revealed Via Kindle

I love my Kindle. I remember vividly swearing (that is to say, both my memory and the swearing were vivid)  that I would never get one because I would never be willing to trade in the tactile pleasure of an actual physical book. I would never compromise the pure, aesthetic reading experience.

Y'know. That bullshit.

Here's the thing. There's really no tactile pleasure involved in carrying around a dozen books, much less the thousands of books that a single Kindle can handle. I get to bring a library with me on the bus, people. A library.

So, anyway, since books on the Kindle still cost money, I've not only been catching up on my reading, but I've been catching up on my reading of the classics. There are tons of free, Kindle-ready books out there that you can download for no charge. Namely all the books you were supposed to read in high school. Or college. Or ever.

Which brings me to my point: every time you finish a book on the Kindle, it invites you to tweet the fact to the world, or to share it on The Facebook. This is probably something I will never do, because:

A: It will reveal all the books that I'm just now reading that I feel like I should have read before now. I mean, I'm nominally a writer here. I feed my wife and kid with words. Not in the literal alphabet soup sense, but you know what I mean.

-and-

B: It will show just how damn slowly I read the books that I should have read like a million years ago.

I mean, I thought I had read like a hundred books in the nine months since I got my Kindle. Then I counted.

Twelve. I've read twelve books.

I feel like an idiot, honestly.

I know this guy (and fellow writer) named Richard Dansky, and the guy reads books like I read soup labels. He writes book reviews, and sometimes he has to start over because he's just finished another book in mid-sentence.

There! You hear that? That was him finishing another book right now.

So, anyway, don't hold your breath for my tweet about Anna Karenina.

Though, spoiler, she dies at the end.