Kindle.

Lots of my friends and coworkers have had Kindles for a long time. 
They were always harping on me to get one, it's soooo great, blah blah.
I have to admit, I'm pretty contrary. If everyone has one of something, I don't really want it.
This is especially true if whatever it is is all over pop culture and the news.
Also, I don't want to admit that they were right.
(Very mature, I know.)

Joe started asking if I didn't want a Kindle for Christmas. I was pretty adamant that no, I most certainly did not want a Kindle, the latest toy everyone seemed to have.
He kept telling me about it, how it doesn't cause eyestrain like looking at a computer does because it's not backlit, etc. How the battery lasts forever because the only time the battery is in use is when the page is being "turned" - as soon as the new text is on the page, the battery is no longer being used. I've been a fan of the Gutenberg Project for a long time and I've downloaded lots of free books to my computer and Droid, but it's SO hard to read something that's backlit that I'd never get very far.
Also, I fell into the "I just like holding a book in my hands" trap. "I liiiike holding a book."
"I liiiiike feeling pages."
(Nevermind the fact that books are heavy and cumbersome and you cannot hold one if you have an incorrigible child. They're too heavy to hold even while feeding a child. You really need both hands to hold a paperback and a hardback is just too heavy.)

Finally, I figured, hey, I like electronic toys. Kindle is cheapish. We went ahead and got one.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah~

I love it. I love it so much.

1.) I buy lots of books. Some books are treasures, like Moby Dick and Lord of the Rings and Hobbit and the Douay-Rheims Bible. These books are hardbound and pretty and look nice on my shelf and are fun to sit and read sometimes. But the vast, vast majority of books I buy are "throwaway books" - books I read once or twice and then am done with. Example, looking at my bookshelf:

• The Healing Power of Herbs
• Herbal Drugstore
• The No-Cry Sleep Solution (Oh, don't get me started. Just don't.)

These are books that I read once and will likely never read again. What a waste. A waste of money (they are all hardback), a waste of paper, a waste of the fuel used to bring them to my house. Of COURSE, I could never throw out a book, so they'll end up at Goodwill or somewhere like that, but in the meantime, they are cluttering up my shelf.

Kindle prevents this kind of waste. Think of a book you want, download it instantly, and then delete it if you're done. Or keep it. You can store THOUSANDS of books on a Kindle, and you can organize them: Herb books, Religious books, Parenting books that do not work not even a little bit, etc.

2. Being a child of the 70s, I'm all about instant gratification. I don't WANT to have to order a book from Amazon and then wait two days for it to arrive. And I'm surely not dragging two kids, one of whom is Incorrigible Drew, out to an actual bookstore. With Kindle, it takes about 5 seconds to download any book, ever.

3. The best things in life might not be free, but the best BOOKS in life sure are. The vast majority of books older than, say, forty years, are no longer copyrighted and are therefore free. You can download free books on Amazon, from Gutenberg Project, and from many other sites - right to your Kindle.
Some of the free books I've downloaded:

• Confessions, St. Augustine
• Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas
• Story of a Soul, St. Therese
• Five Jules Verne books, including Around the World in 80 Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
• Two H.G. Wells books that caught my eye
• A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (AMAZING!)
• Fragments of Ancient Poetry
• Twelve Types, G.K. Chesterton
• Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Douay-Rheims Bible
• Song of Hiawatha
• Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know
• The Divine Comedy
• Treasure Island
• Pride and Prejudice

You know that episode of Twilight Zone where Burgess Meredith plays nerdy bank teller Harold Beemis? And his boss and wife are always bitching at him about reading too much? And then one day Harold is in the bank vault working and a nuclear war happens and he's the only guy on earth to survive?
And for a while it's all good - but then he gets lonely and finds a gun shop and gets a pistol and is going to kill himself when he looks up and sees the giant public library?! And he realizes he can just read and read and read for the rest of his life with no harassment! And he's just getting piles and piles of books and organizing them: "I can read these in January, these in February, these in March!"
And it's all going great until poor Harold breaks his glasses and he's pretty much blind as a bat and then he decides to end it all but he can't find the dang gun without his glasses!!!!111!!!


Well, guess what? If Harold had had a Kindle, he could have just pushed one little button and made the font as big as he wanted, even this big or bigger.
And he would have been fine.

Every day with my Kindle, I feel like Harold Beemis after the nuclear war but before he broke his glasses.

The End.