The Kindle Curse

Christmas is for serious books for the little bit of shelf space I have left. The rest of the year is ruled by Kindle.

Every so often, when I see a kindle book for 99p, I experience a warm glow of excitement, the kind that should translate into an immediate desire to read the damn thing. But no, like  the victim of a demented Victorian butterfly collector, it’s dried, flattened and saved for posterity behind glass

One of the reasons is just the desire to grasp a bargain book, one I have every intent of reading . . . one day . . . when every other book in my TBR pile has been read. I confess, sometimes with shame, I've become little more than one of those tamed ‘educated’ crows who have learnt to peck at meaningless symbols in exchange for the immediate gratification of a fat-ball. 

The result is as you see below, only a quarter of which I’ve read. And yet, every time I scroll down what I could read, I experience the same warm glow I had on first buying them.

I suspect Amazon’s algorithms are triangulating my reading taste or trying too. On several occasions they’ve recommended my own books, which is nice. I suppose there is a pattern of sorts but with enough off-the wall randoms to confuse or make their life difficult.

The selection below reflects the frailty of weak-minded poltroon, a happy/hapless victim of the Daily Kindle Deal. With over 700 books, I reckon that amounts to a return flight to New York or alternatively 250 Costa coffees. That's one way of looking at it, I suppose, but it still beggars belief.