I’ve been re-reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods on my Amazon Kindle this week, going rrrrealy slowly and catching lots of stuff I hadn’t caught in previous reads.
“Reads”? Yeah. I think this is my third time through. The Kindle is funny that way — I’ll pick up new stuff I might not ever look at and really enjoy it, but I’ll also fill it up with “comfort food” for when I just want to curl up with an old friend.
It’s also funny in the stuff that you can’t read on it. J.K. Rowling remains adamant that she won’t allow the Harry Potter books to appear in any electronic forms (even though you can download pirated versions of all seven). Do I really need to re-read those again? Not just yet, but I’m sure I will eventually, and I’d really appreciate not lugging around monstrous hardcovers when I do that.
I want to read Jose Saramango’s, Blindness, though that’s not on the Kindle, either. Same for Cory Doctorow’s, Little Brother, which queerly enough WAS available, but only for a couple days (I missed my shot on that one).
There are a few Robert A. Heinlein books available, like Glory Road and Stranger In A Strange Land, but not his whole booklist, stuff like Time Enough for Love or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Some of the choices are downright odd, to be honest. And I’m a bit of whore when it comes to “collecting” stuff like this; doubly so when its stuff I can collect that won’t pile up in my house-of-many-piles.
I’ve also grabbed a couple “Complete Works Of” collections for the Kindle, finding them to be, almost universally, utter crap. Why? Well, I got “The Complete Conan”, which I thought would be a funky thing to have. Problem: they formatted the text wrong so, instead of flowing from line to line when you read, it cuts off every 1.5 lines so it looks like some extended damned poem, or something.
You try to read it and you find yourself trying to squeeze the lines into meter and/or rhyme — NOT a pleasurable way to read.
What started this sort of free-association post going, by the way, is I was thinking about re-reading some other, non-Kindle stuff. Stuff like the Hellboy collections and the Sandman Ultimate editions we have in the house.
Plus, with the Watchmen movie coming out this Winter, you sort of have to give that one another go, no matter how many times you’ve read it before, right?
Unless that’s just me.
I doubt I’m the only person who reads and re-reads stuff ad infinitum, but I have to wonder sometimes. I mean, it takes a while to chug through all 75 issues of Sandman — do lots of other folks do that on a regular basis? Do folks just read them once, think, “hey that was nice” and then move on with their lives?
Dunno. I figure in a given year at least a quarter to a third of everything I read is stuff I’ve read before. I couldn’t guess if that’s grossly high or grossly low or what. It works for me, though, and the “comfort food” is good to hit between the really big meals.
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