Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Merry Christmas to Me!

The Mister and I stopped buying Christmas presents to each other years ago, we just go out and take the money we would have spent on each other and spend it on ourselves and call it even. It works out fabulously. He buys things I never ever knew he wanted, I buy things he didn't know existed.

After a ridiculous amount of thought and hours of research, I decided to buy myself a little e-reader, a Kobo. I'm a big reader, I read a novel a week on average, and anything related to books calls to me like a siren. And this little thing is about the biggest leap in technology in reading in the last 700 years. It's not an audio book, it's not something you listen to, it looks like a thin, little book with a screen, where you read like a book and try not to drop it in the bath.

I won't be abandoning physical books any time in the near future, they work just fine as they are. But when I was reading Ken Follett's latest book, which was wonderful and totally enthralling, it was HUGE. I had to prop it up with pillows when I wanted to read in bed. Seriously, it is a LOT of book. And it occurred to me that it might be nice to only have to carry around 220 grams of book, rather than the 12 pounds that thing weighed.

And when I travel, I take a lot of books. Once I found myself on a trans-Atlantic flight with only one book and I almost finished it on the flight....I was doling out those pages like methadone to an addict, I tell you. It was probably the most frightened I've ever been flying. So now I take at least 2 books, maybe three, on any flight. Then there are a few more books in my luggage. I take no chances. So when I go to Florida in March I can now bring my little Kobo, which has about 110 books on it, and nothing else. (Who am I kidding?? I'll still bring another book or two, in case the battery runs out or Armageddon happens.)

I've spent a happy few evenings rummaging through websites and finding books to download. I've even figured out how to borrow from the local library and get them on my little gadget.
So far, the only problem is, I've spent so much time sorting the thing out, I haven't had any time to read.

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