One thing the Kindle has helped me remember is how much I love to simply sit and read. When I first bought the Kindle, part of my justification was that it would be more portable than the couple of dozen tomes that would otherwise litter the house and the car. The irony is that now I have the Kindle and another couple of dozen physical books lying around.

I hear about some book that interests me. I look it up on the Kindle. If they have it, I download a free sample. I love these free samples, which are usually the first couple of chapters with an invitation at the end to buy the whole book. It’s like browsing in a bookstore but having all the time in the world to do so. Here are titles I’ve sampled this way so far:

Collapse by Jared Diamond
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
The Conservative Soul by Andrew Sullivan
Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt by Anne Rice (yes, that Anne Rice)
This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust
Her Last Death by Susanna Sonnenberg
Leaving the Saints by Martha Beck
The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker
The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Commission by Philip Shenon
Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
The Know-It-All by A. J. Jacobs
The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs

Please don’t misunderstand. These are books I have sampled. I haven’t read them in their entirety, and in fact, in many cases above, haven’t even read the samples in their entirety. Think of these as books that I have clutched under my arms in the virtual bookstore, trying to decide which ones I’m going to buy. Some of them are even books that I’m definitely not going to read, based on the sample.

If the Kindle store doesn’t stock it, sometimes the book is available at the Gutenberg Project in plain text. This is not as convenient, because I need to run the plain text through a program I wrote, one which cleans up punctuation and line breaks, and then email it to my Kindle. On the positive side, though, it’s entirely free. Here are some titles I found there:

A Voyage To Arcturus by David Lindsay (too late, though, I’d already bought a copy from Amazon)
Walden by Henry David Thoreau (aha! save myself some money there)
Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887 by Edward Bellamy

But when the Kindle store and Project Gutenberg don’t have the title, then I go to my local library’s website and find it there, putting it on reserve so that I can check it out. The library is a very cool institution indeed (free books!) but it does mean that I can’t easily mark up the books or take my sweet time in finishing them. Also they are typically hardback, which means they are larger and heavier. Here are the books I have presently checked out. Again, most of these I have only started, with the exception of Rebuilt and The Search:

Rebuilt by Michael Chorost
Fermat’s Last Theorem by Amir D. Aczel
Mirrormask by Neil Gaiman
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
Startide Rising by David Brin
A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage
The Search by John Battelle

When the book isn’t in the library, I try Bookman’s, a large used-book seller in town, where, if I find what I’m looking for, I’m liable to pay about half of its original price, which is comparable to the Kindle price. Plus it’s mine, meaning I can keep it for as long as I like or mark on it. Books I have found there:

The Culture of Defeat by Schivelbusch and Chase
At the Edge of History by William Irwin Thompson (also available at the library but I wanted my own copy)

If I still can’t find the book, there’s always regular old Amazon.com, whose inventory breadth continues to astonish. I did buy one book recently from there that I couldn’t find any other way:

You’re Lucky You’re Funny by Phil Rosenthal

Looking at this list, it’s hard to imagine that this approach is truly, uh, sustainable. There’s a certain giddy gluttony about it. I expect that many of the Kindle samples will drift out of my memory and off the bottom of my reading list; the library will remind me impatiently to return my checked-out books, many of which I won’t have finished; and when cleaning the house next year I’m sure I’ll find a pile of used books to return to Bookman’s, some of which will not have been finished either.

Some of them, however, will get read all the way through, and I plan to review them on this blog. Here are the books that I have finished, first page to last page, that I haven’t reviewed yet:

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (from Bookman’s)
The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin (from the library at work)
Rebuilt by Michael Chorost (from the local library)
Fool’s Errand by Robin Hobb (on the Kindle)
At the Edge of History by William Irwin Thompson (from Bookman’s)
Believe by Daniel Oran (on the Kindle)

The Kindle seems under-represented because the last three reviews on this blog are Kindle books. Looks like it deserves its name: it has been acting like a reading catalyst for me, rather than something to replace all book sources.