I have to tell you, I love books, I love the tangible weight of them in my hands, I life the heft of them, I like to look atop my bedside dresser and see the pile of books yet to read.

I will never swear off the tactile experience of turning pages and digging my way deeper into the story I am reading.

But I am loving my Kindle!

(and to foster that geek inside me, I feel like I’m in The Next Generation when I hold it, because it’s exactly like one of the small PADDs that Picard would use).

There are so many classics out there that I haven’t read, ones that I know I should read, but was always thinking that if I hold out a little longer on it, perhaps I could find it for a cheaper price, or stumble across a free copy somewhere.

Well thanks to my Kindle, I don’t have to wait anymore!

I was lugging about my giant copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes Volume 1, and despite the fact that it’s broken into two big books, the print on each story tends to be fairly small. Now I don’t need glasses, but I can only read small print for so long before I start to lose the enjoyment I’m getting from the story. There may be a mathematical equation involved there… as print size decreases so does my enjoyment and time spent with it.

So despite the fact that I was enjoying revisiting the tales of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it was a hard slog getting through the stories.

So I figured, hey, why not just download them from the Amazon website, or Project Guttenberg?

Well, I did, thank you very much.

And then I flew through the rest of that book of Sherlock Holmes tales, though I still, happily have an entire second volume to revisit (which is also already on my Kindle, which doesn’t weigh nearly as much as the book itself.) I got more enjoyment out of the stories this time, because the print was paperback size, and consequently I just booted along! Which is good, because I do so love revisiting those stories.

After the revelation of how much I enjoyed (emphasizing once again, that I still love physical copies of books) reading on a Kindle, I began to fill my portable library with all those classics that I had read before, wanted to reread again, or had never read. So I loaded up on Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Mark Twain, H.R. Haggard and, as previously mentioned, all the Sherlock Holmes tales by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

I also decided to take a chance on, and will invite comment and recommendations with this next author, Robert E. Howard. I had never read any of the Conan stories, my only familiarity with the character were the two films with Arnold, and occasionally seeing one of the comics at friends’ houses.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, I knew there would be sword and sorcery, but I think in my mind it had been mired down by all the not so great films of that type from the 80s.

I was genuinely surprised at how much I enjoyed the stories. They rocket along with their tales of magic, betrayal, and attractive women-folk. And they still work!

My favorite, so far, has been The Scarlet Citadel, there were moments in that really got to me. The inhabited tunnels he explores after he makes his escape are truly frightening, and I was getting right into them.

I believe I have most of the Conan stories now on my Kindle, but would be very eager to hear which ones are favorites so I can turn to them next.

And see, I would never have even read one of the Conan stories if I hadn’t been able to download it to my Kindle for immediate enjoyment.

(I should also point out that there are now some 596 books on my Kindle waiting to be read or re-read! I could never have carried around that many, and now I have so many to choose from, and no doubt more to come!)

So what are you reading?