Storms came pounding through the area last night. No thunder and lightning, just lots of lovely rain.
I was all cozy in bed listening to the rain and reading Baltimore Blues by Laura Lippman. This is the first in a mystery series starring unemployed journalist Tess Monaghan. Tess lives in an apartment over the bookstore owned by her Aunt Kitty; she is fit from sculling on the Patapsco River and running; and she tries to make ends meet by working part time in the bookstore and doing some clerking work for an uncle who has a state job.
Things pick up for her when her best friend and fellow rower, Rock, is accused of murdering a high-profile lawyer who just happens to be having an affair with Rock's fiancée. So Tess is digging around trying to find proof of her friend's innocence.
I can't say that I am very committed to the characters, but it is an easy bedtime read and it is the first in a series so I will give it time.
Anyway, in the middle of chapter ten, there was a huge BOOM and the lights went out. It took me a second or two to figure out what had happened because I am reading the book on my Kindle Fire and of course it stayed lit. The rest of the house was pitch black.
So I have found another use for the Kindle besides holding books. It makes a great flashlight! I climbed out of bed and held the lighted ebook in front of me as I padded to the front of the house to see that, yes, the entire neighborhood had gone dark.
I trundled back to bed and continued reading for a while. I know that a book can light up one's imagination, but I had no idea that I could use one to light up the room in a power outage. I am glad to know that I am surely getting my money's worth from my Kindle - in more ways than one.
Yesterday I ran into an acquaintance at the post office. She is an illustrator and she told me that her 'creative team' had a digital app that had been selling well. She explained that it was an interactive book - an adult fairy tale - with music, pop-up illustrations, and sound effects. It sounded like fun and she said I could get it through Amazon on my Kindle Fire for the amazing price of 99 cents.
I am not an app buyer and am not intrigued with the offerings of the app stores. But, I took the bait on this one and ordered it this morning thinking it would make for a positive blog post. I was very disappointed. Although the idea of tapping the screen and hearing music or seeing bubbles floating up through the text or experiencing the sound of rain and thunder is very clever, the narrative is so forced and ugly and not in the least bit funny that after one chapter I was ready to give up. But I plowed on through Chapter Two and then closed the book (as it were) in disgust.
I can't imagine that this woman and her 'team' thought that this tale was in any way amusing. If it had been a proper book I would have thrown it across the room.
I doubted if I could return this digital nightmare and get my money back but I called Amazon anyway. To my delight, Craig of the App Store Customer Service Desk said he would make a one-time exception and issue me a refund. I told him him the app was so awful that I didn't even want it on my Kindle as a reminder. He assured me it would disappear.
Thank you Craig.
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| My Kindle Fire |
I sometimes think I take this book obsession too far. Not only do I buy books, use the library, and own a Nook Color, I have now bought myself a Christmas present: the Kindle Fire. It came yesterday.
Does one really need two e-readers?
Apparently I do. I already had Kindle books on my laptop and my android phone but I don't like to read on the laptop and reading on the phone's small screen gets to be a bit much. So when the Kindle Fire went on sale on Amazon on Cyber Monday I quickly clicked 'Add to Cart'.
Here is a sampling of the free Kindle books that I already had:
Common Sense by Thomas Paine
Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl (Sister of that "Idle Fellow") by Jenny Wren
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Literary Lapses by Stephen Leacock
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Poems by Emily Dickinson
My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
My thinking was that most of them, except Bleak House, could be accessed on my phone and parts read quickly while waiting in an airport, doctor's office, or at a coffee shop. Now that I have a 'big screen' to read them on, I am looking forward to digging in. And I am looking forward to finding more free books of which Amazon has plenty.
