A friend of mine recently bought a Kindle and has been raving about it. I had a go, but even though I can see it’s an impressive bit of technology, I just can’t get excited about it. There are a few instances where I can see that it would be handy to have one – expeditions for example, where you may end up tent-bound for days at a time and a library of books would be a real bonus, but I simply can’t imaging lying in bed at night with a gadget instead of a good old fashioned book. I also can’t imagine doing away with my bookshelves around the house and substituting them for a few microscopic memory chips. I think that as much as anything it’s about sharing. Many of us like to lose ourselves in a good book, and shut the rest of the world out for a while, but I can’t think of many people who don’t enjoy chatting about what they’ve just read. More often than not these discussions start with the influence of an actual book – be it on a shelf or in somebody’s hand. Using a kindle effectively turns all books into secrets. Anyway, I thought this might be a good opportunity to share a few of my favourite books so here goes:
Fiction
Number 9 Dream (and most of David mItchell’s other books to be fair!)
Poisonwood Bible – Barbera Kingsolver
American Tabloid – James Ellroy
House Of Sleep – Jonathan Coe
The Raw Shark Texts – Steven Hall
Adventure Paddle To The Amazon – Don Starkell
The Cruellest Miles – Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury
Pappillon (am reading at the moment) – Henri Charrière and Patrick O’Brian
The Long Walk – Slavomir Rawicz
North To The Night – Alvah Simon
Old Classics To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Swiss Family Robinson – Johann David Wyss
A Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Some Surprisies Along The Way Blackbox – Nick Walker
Star Of The Sea – Joseph O’Connor
Shadow Over Babylon – David Mason
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