18 February 2011

Reading on an eBook.

Since buying my Kindle, I´ve intensified what was already a passion for reading and now almost always have my lovely eBook in my handbag so that I can use all those odd, normally wasted moments at bus stops, in long queues, or when waiting for some office to open. (here in Spain you can never rely on opening hours as stated on the door!).

Recently, when trawling through the Amazon bookstore, I saw that C J Sansom had brought out his fifth Matthew Shardlake book. Since I absolutely love them, no sooner had I seen the blurb than it was in my Kindle and I was away for the next couple of days. Shardlake is a sympathetic character - a hunchbacked lawyer in the Tudor era. The first book starts in the period when the monasteries were being dissolved. This book is set in the final years of Henry VIII when he was married to Catherine Parr. As all the others in the series, it is beautifully researched and you get a real feel of what life was like then on the fringes and even far away from the glitter of Court life. Brilliant!

The other book I´ve enjoyed immensely recently is Emma Donoghue´s "The Room". It relates the grim but fascinating tale of a young college student who is abducted and kept in a shed in the garden of her sexual abuser. The son she has from this relationship tells the story, beginning on his fifth birthday, and you are kept on the edge of your seats right up to the final page. Great book!

Long Live eBooks!

Amazon Books and Kindle.


I have a special way of saving towards stuff I want but can´t afford to buy outright. Since I live in Spain and have euros as currency, and since Spain is quite a popular tourist area for other EU nations, we often get euros which are not Spanish. Every few days I go through my purse and remove the "foreign" euros(most often German, Irish, French, Italian, Potuguese) and pop them in my money savings box.

A couple of months ago I finally had enough to buy a much longed-for eBook. I chose, after carefully scrutinising lots of different sales PR, Amazon´s Kindle. I must say, I´m very pleased with it and it´s cetainly one purchase I don´t regret a bit.At the same time, I do love real books and hope they never go out of commission. I remember from my childhood the special smell of the book stacks in my local Birmingham Public Library and I revel in browsing in book shops. But an eBook is brilliant in many ways.

Mine has a really long battery life before you need to recharge. I bought the 3G model (more expensive but in my view worth every penny), which works on the same sort of technology as mobile phones and when the wireless connection is activated I can access Amazon´s bookstore and order books which are in the Kindle almost immediately. With an ordinary non-3G model you would need to be near a WiFi hotspot to do this.

A member of the Writers´Circle I belong to has a Kindle. He went on the Trans Siberian railway last summer. Somewhere in the Steppes, he fancied reading a particular book, looked it up on Amazon and was able to read it within a few minutes. I find this quite gobsmacking. Not that I plan a trip so far away but my Kindle has come in very useful in the last few months of Hubby´s Broken Hip. I´ve had to sit in doctor´s waiting rooms, hospital clinics and now at the physiotherapist´s for ages. Of course you can take a real book with you but I would point out that Ken Follet´s "Pillars of the Earth" is a whopper to cram into a handbag, whereas the Kindle can hold hundreds of books and is both slim and light.

So long live my lovely Kindle with its pink cover (optional extra!). My next target for saved foreign euros will probably be a small laptop - I think they´re called netbooks.