I also occasionally manage to read for fun. I recently finished Hugh Howey’s marvelous trilogy (Wool, Shift, Dust), and it gave just enough glimpses of story lines beyond his that I may eventually read some of the spin-offs (The Mongoliad is the other work I’ve read that tried to establish that model, but wasn’t nearly as compelling for me; I wanted it to be Neal Stephenson’s work, and it just wasn’t).
No pictures for this post in part because I’m reading these largely on my Kindle, which is a very different experience than buying a physical book, flipping the pages, and writing in the margins. Sure, I could grab a picture of the books’ covers to include in posts like these, but not having had a cover on my reading (sure, it might have appeared as an image in the e-book, but I didn’t see it every time I picked up the book), that just seems artificial. So the experience on Kindle is drastically different (and far less satisfying to “crack open” a new book or “shelve” a finished one), but it also opens up some possibilities to read things I wouldn’t normally buy or borrow, because they’re advertised, they appear as special offers/daily deals, etc.
To whit: I’m now in the midst of Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, and Terry Pratchett’s Snuff on my Kindle. I haven’t read Bukowski before, and while I’m only 14% of the way through it, so far I think I’m not likely to go out of my way to read more. Of course, that’s what I said about Pratchett when I read Carpe Jugulum in 2002, but when his books pop up for a book or two and I want something light as a diversion, and won’t mind if I never get around to it, I grab one every couple of years and they usually get read.
So Kindle reading is different than regular reading is different than academic reading. Shocker there. I’m hardly opposed to ebooks, obviously, but my physical books are never going away, and ebooks I want forever end up in physical copies on my shelves anyway.
