For reasons I don’t fully understand the Kindle has re…. kindled my interest in fiction.  Ever since finishing The Illiad I’ve been unimpressed with fiction’s ability to keep its basic promise of telling a compelling story that reveals a part of reality that’s otherwise unknown, unexplored, or at least entertaining as these “revelations” are usually pedestrian or impossible.  But, I maintain an interest in being a generically well-read person despite inevitably turning back to what I consider the vastly more compelling world of fact and discovery that has a roughly 1-to-1 correspondence with reality.

The Kindle upturns this, maybe by reversing my fear of someone discovering my counteridiomatic reading or having to lug around a book that by definition contains something that never happened.  So, I started reading the collected stories of HP Lovecraft and was suckered into paying the extra dollar to get 102 stories instead of the more common collection of about 70.  I started reading the collection and immediately realized why the standard corpus includes 30 fewer stories; because those 30 stories suck.  Every page was supposed to contain tales of the macabre involving beings from beyond the uncaring universe in which we drift.  I’ve read about 10 so far and each one of them absolutely blew.  I’m tempted to do something I never do except with music and “just read the good ones”.