Kindle 3: Review

I keep reading books and not writing about them. Which isn’t really the idea, is it? They tend to be ebooks, so maybe it’s the fact that there are many unread books waiting behind the one in hand which is distracting, like so much online activity. I don’t want to moan about that too much, because there are great books I’ve come across that I probably wouldn’t have read on paper – Terry Castle’s The Professor (still hardback only: big, expensive), and recently Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, which points in all sorts of unusual directions, as well as plenty of cannonical ones in interesting ways. I regret not reading Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles on paper, because it is so good, and I regret trying out Audur Ava Olafsdottir’s The Greenhouse and Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies electronically because they are not good enough. Which is not fair, probably. It is great having a library’s worth of free classics seconds away at any time (I’ve found that the Adelaide University Library site formats them pretty well – Gutenberg can be quite variable), and in theory it’s good to have the Kindle Store itself always on hand (leaving aside how clumsily Penguin do ebooks, and how much they overcharge) – but it discourages meandering, replacing it with impulse.

Above, anyway, are some second hand books I picked up yesterday. Very excited to be re-acquainted with Agaton Sax, about whom I had completely forgotten.
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Update from the second book down: ‘The eagerness of pursuit overcomes the satisfaction to result from the accomplishment’. That’s it, exactly.

Update two: Mrs Bookworld has a more balanced (and more positive) take.