Monday, September 28, 2009

Warming up to Kindle?

I notice some college has started an experiment with putting the reading list of a few courses on Kindle and enabling all the students to obtain a device.  I was wondering how long it would take someone to do that and see what happens.  In this case, many of the students seem to be negative about the experience. 

I purchased a Kindle2 mainly to download book collections, especially from Mobi which has inexpensive collected works of famous authors.  I'm not interested in reading newspapers or blogs for a fee on Kindle.

So far I have downloaded enough to last a couple lifetimes.  Some of the collected works have 30 to 100 books and stories in them.  That does not mean they are really the complete works of that author, for example, the Hawthorne collection has only selections from his Italian, French, British and American Notebooks.  I guess they got bored with Nathaniel's detailed observations and psychological analysis of his children's antics around the house found in the American Notebooks.

So this is my fairyland of literature and history caught inside a white carapace:

Thousand and One Nights -- Richard Burton translation
Complete Wizard of Oz books
Complete William Shakespeare
Diary of Samuel Pepys
Discourses of Epictetus
Divine Comedy - Dante, English and Italian
Emerson's Essays
Essential H. G. Wells
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Gibbons
History of the Pelopennesian Wars - Thucydides
Illiad and Odyssey - Homer
King James Bible
Lectures and Interviews - Robert G. Ingersoll
The Prince - Machiavelli
Varney the Vampire - Thomas Preskett
Works of: Dumas; Dickens; Defoe; Poe; Chaucer; Maupassant; Melville; Balzac; Conrad; Verne; Lewis Carroll; Twain; Hawthorne; Robert Lewis Stevenson; Kipling, Sir Walter Scott; and last but not least, H.P. Lovecraft.

So far I have resisted the temptation to reread the works of Jane Austin, Dostoevsky, or Friedrich Nietzsche, or to wade into the ocean of prose created by Tolstoy or Henry James, with whom I am less familiar.  I am beginning to wonder how much space could be left on my machine, since each work takes up many times the space of the average novel.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I hate Kindle.