I decided to buy a Kindle in order to keep myself from over-packing books for my summer travels. It arrived today, and so far I love it. I've loaded it up with a bunch of the free books that Amazon offers:
- "Lord Jim" and "Typhoon" by Joseph Conrad
- "Far From the Madding Crowd" by Thomas Hardy
- "Best Russian Short Stories" - a collection with selections from Pushkin, Turgenev, Gogol, etc.
- "The Happy Prince and Other Stories," "The Canterville Ghost," and "Intentions" by Oscar Wilde (I guess I'm in a Wilde mood!)
- "Chronicles of Avonlea" by L.M. Montgomery (I can't believe that you can get the entire Anne of Green Gables series! Talk about comfort reading!)
- "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- "The Professor" by Charlotte Bronte
- "Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex" by Freud
- "The Book of Dragons" by E. Nesbit (more childhood comfort reading!)
- "Night and Day" by Virginia Woolf
- "Of Human Bondage" by W. Somerset Maugham (I laughed really hard at the Amazon reviews along the lines of "this is not about kinky sex, but it's still a pretty good book.")
- "On Prayer and the Contemplative Life" by Thomas Aquinas
- "Poems published in 1820" by John Keats (been wanting to read more of his stuff since I saw Bright Star)
- "Thus Spake Zarathustra" by Nietzsche
- "Lady Susan" by Jane Austen (I think I've read everything else she published, so looking forward to this one)
- "How to Tell a Story and Other Essays" by Mark Twain
- "Poems" by Emily Dickinson
- "Middlemarch" by George Eliot
- "The Invisible Man" by H.G. Wells
- "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair
- "Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau
- "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by Shakespeare
- "Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace" by Tolstoy (you know, for all my free time. I've actually started W&P a few times but never finished it, in part because it's such a big bulky thing to carry around).
For the most part, these are books that I've never read before. I'm really excited about having the psychological security of having a lot of books without the physical bulk of books. Like Malinowski, I find a great deal of comfort in reading "trashy novels" when the external world gets too hectic.
I hope that the Kindle handles PDFs well. I've set an ambitious goal of uploading about 100 recent anthropology articles into the PDF and reading/annotating one article per day. We'll see how well I do with that.
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