Review: "Eternity is a Kindle with a dead battery"
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 11, 2014
I can certainly identify with the author's predicament of having books take over her home, filling bookshelves, staircases, and even the floors. And like her, I found salvation in the Amazon Kindle. But it's hard to part with so many old friends - books that we've had for decades, gathering dust and mildew, but still treasured in our heart. The author wrote, "It is not the words I hate, not literature, but their physical manifestation as old, musty, dusty, yellowing, cracked objects, heavy to lug around."When the author moved to a smaller flat, she had to dispose of her huge library of books collected over the last half-century. In doing so, she reminisced over the books she remembered the most. It was a grand tour of literature, and she regretted that many of the classics she had enjoyed in print were not available as ebooks.As much as Ms. Grant hated to part with her huge library of printed books, she did appreciate her Kindle, with its ability to increase font sizes to accommodate her weakening eyesight, a feature that many older people, including myself, love. She marveled that she was ever able to read the small print in many of her printed books. But her Kindle wasn't the perfect solution, as she found when it died at the beginning of a long flight, leaving her with nothing to read but the airline's in-flight magazine.But in the end, as much as she missed her books, Ms. Grant notes that like the typewriter giving way to the computer, it was time to move on. If only her old bookshelves didn't look so bare.