Average Jane Reads

The Kindle app is one of my favorite things about having an iPad. I spend so much time reading stuff online that I don't mind the appearance of the black words on the white screen at all. In my pre-iPad days I borrowed my sister's actual Kindle and read several books, but I just couldn't get used to its interface at all.

I have the Kindle app on my iPhone 5 as well, which is incredibly convenient. The two devices will sync back and forth so you can always catch up when you switch from one to another.

I've turned into a rather rabid series completist. To be honest, I've probably always been like that, but it seems more noticeable when I start reading a series that already has lots of books in it and then I am driven to read them all. Right away!

My participation in my various book clubs has dropped off a lot. I'm still nominally in three of them, but I've started to turn into the person who didn't read the book by the time the meeting date arrives. I usually read (or finish) the books eventually, but of course that doesn't matter much when the discussion has already taken place.

I'm still reading a lot of actual paper books, despite the convenience of ebooks. However, these days most of my Amazon packages are filled with dog treats and other miscellaneous items rather than books.

Just for fun, here's a list of all of the things I've read on the Kindle app so far. The ones with a single asterisk were book club selections; the ones with two asterisks were book club selections that I absolutely hated:

• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
• The Magician King by Lev Grossman
• Scarp Stonebreaker: Hammer of the South by Andrew Lyon
• The Hidden Hand and Capitola's Peril by E.D.E.N. Southworth (Whoo! Forgot how racist these were until I read them again!)
• The Parasol Protectorate series by Gail Carriger
• Thanks for Killing Me by Bill Barol
• Rules of Civility by Amor Towles* (didn't ever finish this one)
• A Redbird Christmas by Fannie Flagg*
• Speed Shrinking by Susan Shapiro** (we all hated this one)
• A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin (I had the rest of the series in paperback form)
• Emma by Jane Austen* (this almost deserves two asterisks because it was such a slog, but I'll give it the "Clueless" pass)
• Bitch In a Bonnet: Reclaiming Jane Austen From the Stiffs, the Snobs, the Simps and the Saps by Robert Rodi
• Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James**
• Crazy Enough: A Memoir by Storm Large*
• Crossroads Road: A Novel by Jeff Kay
• Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher*
• The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
• Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson
• A Howl in the Night by J.K. Brandon
• Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher*
• Shut Up and Give Me the Mic by Dee Snider
• Confessions of a Prairie Bitch by Alison Arngrim*
• Thin Blue Smoke by Doug Worgul*
• Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling*
• Sharp Objects: A Novel by Gillian Flynn*
• How To Live Safely in A Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu* (This was my selection. I liked it; everyone else hated it.)
• Dresden Files books (all except the first six, which I have in paperback) by Jim Butcher
• The Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon
• Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story by Evan I. Schwartz
• Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
• Gone Girl: A Novel by Gillian Flynn*

See? That's not very many in less than two years.

Here's the scant handful of ebooks I've bought but not yet read:

• Off to Be the Wizard by Scott Meyer
• Oh Myyy! (There Goes The Internet) by George Takei (just started it last night)
• The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch and Lee Chadeayne
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

My physical to-be-read pile, which usually sits on the coffee table in my living room, is considerably beefier.

How are you reading these days? Ebooks, real books, library books?