Question of the week: do you want a Kindle and what should I read on my holiday?


So lovely wife bought me a Kindle for Christmas. Ain’t she lovely? Now we could argue a lot about the merits of Amazon’s eBook reader: a lot of people are dubious about them at first, but I love mine and once I’ve shown them how it works, what it’s like to read with, the free/cheap books you can get for it, etc, they generally end up wanting/buying one.

So part one of this week’s question is:

Do you want/have a Kindle? If not, why not?

However, an often overlooked advantage of the Kindle is that when it comes to going on holiday, it’s a revolution. We normally take about an entire suitcase full of books with us, most of which we end up leaving behind at a book exchange. We end up having to weigh all our suitcases very carefully before we go to make sure the books are all evenly distributed so we don’t go over our weight allowance.

Take a couple of Kindles and their battery chargers, though, and you’re pretty much sorted, since it weighs about a quarter of a kilo (half a pound) and can fit 3,000+ books in its memory. Woo hoo!

However, you do need ebooks for it and while I’ve got a lovely supply of free eBooks, I would like some more things to read when I’m on holiday next week. So part 2 of this week’s question is:

Are there any books you’d recommend for holiday reading, preferably available on the Kindle?
