No bookmarks needed...

A month ago I celebrated a big birthday and was gifted a big present...an e-book, the Kindle...it was given to me by my children, grandchildren and friends; and to make the gift even better I found half a dozen Amazon gift cards with it allowing me to buy books on-line...

I'd been thinking about buying an e-book for several months but couldn't decide whether to go Kindle or Nook...my mind was happily made up for me...I've been in the process of getting rid of books on shelves in more than one room in our house...I took some to the public library and Goodwill but I still have a stack of a dozen or more books on my desk waiting to go somewhere...

I recently re-joined the public library and found my favorite section...the section of books in large print... I'm not getting any younger and large print helps old guys like me...well, with the Kindle I am able to adjust the fonts to my preference as well as adjusting the word spacing...no more library except to take my 11 year old grand daughter there so she can continue reading her favorite authors too...but, public libraries may be in the e-book lending business soon and I may be able to read best sellers for free...

Amazon.com sells best selling books for $25 and up, but e-books go from $5 to $15...such a deal...but the happiest thing I've found is being able to get free books, and I mean thousands of free classic books by the world's best authors...I immediately bought a few best sellers and a few free ones...I discovered the Kindle will hold hundreds of books and I plan on loading it up with dozens of free classics I've been wanting to read for years...I'll do it because I can...

In the past few weeks I've experimented with options on the Kindle like switching from book to book to see what would happen...would I lose my place or what...well, as if by magic when I stopped reading a book, went to another then went back to the first, my place had been saved...how do it know? No bookmarks needed and it's even possible to write notes in the margins of the books...I love this thing...

I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas because I thought I had read it when I was in either high school or college; I recently was flipping channels on TV and just missed watching the movie...so I decided I had nothing to lose by getting the free book...I started reading it and discovered I don't remember much about it...I knew it was about a man falsely imprisoned for a dozen years or more finally escaping and beginning to hunt down the men who sent him there...so far I've read about a third of the book and I love it...it is somewhat similar to two other books written by Dumas, the Man in the Iron Mask and the Three Musketeers which I will get next for free...the curious thing about all three of these is at the time I was in high school they were on the Vatican Index of Forbidden Books, books considered by the Catholic Church to be sensual, heretical or romantic...I didn't know it at the time...the key 'ingredient' of the Count of Monte Cristo is revenge...strictly forbidden maybe unless you're Italian or a member of the Mafia or Cardinals and priests who must have read the forbidden books going back two hundred years...I Googled the Index to discover it was abandoned in 1966, after my high school and college days...I will post a blog about the Index soon because it so very interesting; I discovered some of the forbidden books included astronomer Galileo for writing that our solar system revolved around the sun and not the earth as the Church said and Victor Hugo for The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables...