A library in my hand

I love books. I have several thousand books.
We've run out of wall space for bookcases, and have run out of bookcase space (despite double horizontal stacking) for books.

And my best friend, who I'd imagine you all know is my beloved Nettie, and is the best best friend anyone can have, bought me a Kindle.

And I love it.

It can't replace real paper books for me, but it can damn well supplement them.

I have been reading, (free from the Kindle store) for the last three weeks or so, mostly Victorian novels, with a few forays into Edwardian. Thing is, most of these are difficult to get in paper format, either from the library or from a bookshop. But free digital copies? Yes please.

So, a few of the books I've been reading:
The Strange Case of Doctor Jeckyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886
The Lost World - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1912
The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne, 1878
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins, 1859
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde, 1890
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott, 1868
Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K Jerome, 1889
The Voyage Out - Virginia Woolf, 1915
Diary of a Nobody - George and Weedon Grossmith, 1892
The Damnation of Theron Ware - Harold Frederic, 1896

There's a lushness of language in novels from this time that nowadays, for better or worse, would sound ridiculous. I find it quite easy to get lost in the language. It's so pretty.

I won't say I've converted to the Kindle - I'm in the middle of three paperbacks as I type this, and spent £25 in a bookshop yesterday - however, I don't see why one can't have the best of both worlds and use both the Kindle and paper books. Because that means more books, and I can never think of that as a bad thing.

PS: Whilst looking up the links for this blog post, I downloaded Little Men and Jo's Boys by Louisa May Alcott, and the entire works of Jerome K Jerome. All for free!