Kindle: Pro and Con

I thank the Kindle inventor and my family for their Christmas gift. In one month, I've regained my reading pace, completing seven books (The Round House, Epitaph for a Peach, Absurdistan, The Sense of an Ending, Salvage the Bones, Home, and Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death. This afternoon, I started Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-distance Swimmer, and moments ago I downloaded A Visit from the Goon Squad, having learned it's wise to have a book loaded before finishing one. The best thing about my Kindle? Ease of reading: I can adjust the text size and brightness to compensate for my still-out-of-balance reading prescription.

I love reading this way, but . . . .

I miss the smell and feel of paper, the weight of a book, the beauty of the dust jacket and cloth cover, and illustrations large enough to see. I had to squint to see the line drawings of stink bugs and other creatures in Life Everlasting, an irritation that actually interfered with my reading pleasure. And I miss using my colored flags to mark pages and passages to return to when further along in the book. Only today did I figure out how to mark a whole passage and not just a word and then read all the marked passages. I can't, however, flip around the way I used to. And I'm a dedicated book flipper. For me, reading can be a physical activity.

Nevertheless, I've got my reading mojo working, and that makes me a happy woman.