My mother said she wanted a Kindle for Christmas and I chose to be the good son and give her mine which I’d hardly used.  I wanted the device to function out of the box (which I’m glad I kept), so I wiped my stuff from it, deactivated it, and contacted my mom to get her Amazon login.

Me: Mom.
Mom: Yes.
Me: Give me your Amazon login info.
Mom: Why?
Me: It’s a secret.
Mom: Ok (gives info)>
Me: Thanks.  You won’t regret it, probably. *hangs up*

I registered the Kindle to my mother’s account and then purchased for her a few Kindle editions of books she had mentioned she wanted to read.  I was going to win Christmas, until my mom called.

Me: Terry Robinson.
Mom: I just received a bunch of emails from Amazon saying I had bought books for something called a “Kindle” do you know what that’s about?
Me: Yeah, that was me. *Thinking quickly* They’re part of your Christmas gift, you should also be receiving an email shortly for a gift card in the amount of the cost of those books.
Mom: Oh, that’s so nice.

Since I had purchased the e-books from the Kindle that was then attached to my mom’s account they were billed to her account.  In effect, I had billed my mother for her own Christmas gift.  I hope the gift card covers that oversight.  Good job, Terry.

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”.

After instructing my morning sessions I gunned home, for today was Kindle Day, and come hell or high water I would be there to receive my e-reader.  Around 3 PM I really had to use the bathroom but I was not going to waste this opportunity to break in my Kindle and patiently waited until the device was delivered at 4:30 PM before darting to the can after activating it.

The device is amazingly readable and there’s a magic to watching the words drip away to be replaced with another set on something that looks so much like paper with a reflectivity between a glossy magazine and standard library print.  The search function and dictionary functions work very well and allowed for meta moments where I used the automatic dictionary within the American Heritage Dictionary to define ‘potentate’ within ‘plenipotentiary’.  The browser functionality is almost comical in how it renders color-rich pages in gray scale and completely lacks javascript support knocking out 60% of web functionality.  The upside is that the browser requires only a trickle of bandwidth as anything that would consume bits is largely stripped out and is free.  With a little planning, I think this is a feature that could be well used.

The first book I read was Rework which was mediocre.  I’ll need something to wash its taste out of my mouth.

I hate the Kindle, Amazon’s electronic e-book reader.  I really have no qualm with the device I suppose but the model of licensing reading material and calling it a “book reader” smacks of consumer injustice.  But for health reasons I may need to get one.

I read on the can as most people of learning do.  I finished Robert R. Colton and Joel A. Palmer’s History of the Modern World largely on the toilet and some 3k of the 4.7k pages of the Dark Tower heptilogy were consumed on the crapper.  This habit has had long-term health effects though as I’m now reading the 1.3 kilopage tome The Codebreakers and my right wrist starts hurting after a few minutes.  This has never happened before and I fear it may endanger my ability to read books larger than a few hundred pages.

So I’m reduced to three options:
1) Buy an e-book reader
2) Eschew large text consumption on the john
3) Construct some ridiculous articulated lapboard to mount in the bathrooms of my house.

The answer is obvious; I have a battery of counterbalance potty tables to build.