Millions of words in the palm of my hand

It's a good day when the cars never leave the driveway but you feel like you got a ton of stuff done. I vacuumed/swept, did all my laundry (empty hampers! can I get an AMEN?), found a home for the 8452 spools of embroidery thread in my sewing room, helped my mother put up new curtains and made turkey hash for dinner. I also re-read a book this weekend. I'm not a re-reader. Life is short and with so many great books out there still left unread, I can't waste time going back and reading something a second time! But I borrowed Curtis' Kindle over the weekend to see how I would like it and he had Stephen King's Dark Tower series there just calling my name. I really enjoyed the series the first time but it's been awhile and I wanted to see if it still held its charm for me.

The first book isn't that long, but it's been a long time since I've finished a book in two days so that's saying something. I read the Godfather in a single day as a teenager but lately most books I read take me weeks months to finish.

I really enjoyed the Kindle and soon got over it's 1990s styling. It's not back-lit so it didn't strain my eyes. I also liked that I could change the font size on the fly while reading. I was a 3 on a scale of 1-6 most of the time but while lying in bed fighting off sleepiness I cranked it up all the way to 6. Instead of pages, it has locations (basically a longer number that indicates how far along you are in the work), but regardless of font size my location is the same as yours in the same book so we can reference them.

You can highlight passages you want to remember and even send them to yourself as "clippings". You can look up any words in the built-in dictionary (something I always say I'll do while reading a paper book but never do) and you can add your own notes in the "margin" as well. The best feature, though, is on Saturday mornings when Rich wants to keep sleeping while using me as a body pillow I can extract one arm enough to hold the Kindle whereas a paperback would have never survived. It's ironic that the paper book I'm reading right now isn't available on Kindle, so I'll have to soldier through that one. But I really do believe I'll read more with a Kindle than with paper books.

Rich says he likes the feel, smell and heft of a book in his hands. He likes seeing them on his shelves as momentos of the experience he had with them. But for me even if it's a book I love (like Gunslinger) I just see it taking up a lot of space in our house versus a few megabytes on a hard drive somewhere. I compare it to when we used to keep all our CDs out on shelves to play. It was nice to browse them or for visitors to come over and peruse our music tastes. But the cases busted and we lost part of the box sets in the house somewhere and if we scratched one in the car, it was a total loss. Now everything is in iTunes and streamed throughout the house or my iPhone. Now I'm annoyed if I get a CD in a case because I have to figure out where I'm going to store it after I get it on iTunes and backed up.

The one advantage of a hard copy is it's a lot easier to share with others. Our paperback Stephen King books we can dole out to all our friends, but I can't mail you my Kindle and keep reading on my own. I can only imagine my back would have been much happier in school if I had the complete works of Shakespeare in a 10 ounce package versus the SpineTwister 9000 tomb I carried around.