Blog Entry: Links and Kindles and Comfort Books
I have so many links to pass on, I'm going to list them first, before I can forget:
First, Tracy at Tall Tales and Short Stories just interviewed me about the writing/submission process for A Most Improper Magick. You can read the interview (and her review of AMIM) here.
Second, Jocelyn at Book Babblers interviewed me here.
And for anyone with kids who's going to be within driving distance of Newport, Wales on October 27th: you can check out the full programme for Big Read Day online, including the worldbuilding writing workshop I'll be leading for kids aged 10 and up, "How to Write Your World Real". You can also find a booking form here.
Whew! Now on to the real entry. :)
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A long time back, I posted here asking what people's favorite e-readers were. Over the past year, a toxic combination of exhaustion and CFS has made it almost impossible for me to read long manuscripts on my computer screen...which has struck a fatal blow to my (very important) habit of critiquing novels for close friends and crit partners. Not only does that suck for me (because getting to read great novels before they're published is a huge gift!), it means I'm really letting down everybody who critiques my novels by not helping them out in return.
So, after months of indecision, I am finally breaking down and spending the money on an e-reader. From everything I've read and heard, the iPad seems like by far the best one out there, but...well, sadly, we don't have that much free money! The prices on the new Kindles have finally dropped to a point where we can justify the expense, though, so Patrick and I are going to buy a joint Kindle this month.
This is something I wouldn't be doing if I didn't want to do critiques - I definitely prefer reading books on paper - but I'm getting excited about it already. Last week, as I was re-reading a favorite book for the umpteenth time (a Regency novel for adults, Loretta Chase's Miss Wonderful), I thought about how great it would be to have extra e-copies of all my very favorite comfort books stored on my Kindle so that they were always available, no matter what. I started making a list in my head of all the books I would want to ALWAYS have on me for comfort and fun.
Then, of course, I looked on Amazon...and, curses! Those are almost all books that were published pre-kindle (or just without kindle rights), so of course there aren't any electronic versions available of my favorite comfort books. Wahh!
Still, it was fun making the list in my head. Here's a quick sampling from it (I'm going to save you guys the whole list, because it was LONG!):
- Ilona Andrews, On the Edge (adult rural fantasy)
- Loretta Chase, Miss Wonderful, Mister Impossible, and Lord Perfect (adult Regency romantic comedies)
- Joan Bauer, Squashed (YA comedy)
- Georgette Heyer, The Talisman Ring (18th-century romantic comedy)
- Virginia Euwer Wolff, The Mozart Season (lovely MG novel about family and music)
- Linda Urban, A Crooked Kind of Perfect (quirky MG comedy)
- Lois McMaster Bujold, Paladin of Souls (high fantasy adventure for women, with a great quasi-historical setting)
...aaaand so many more!
What about you guys? If you could stick extra copies of any books in the world onto an e-reader, which books would you carry around with you all the time?