Created a category in the Kindle Touch called “Free eBooks I have READ”.

These books I have mostly found through the following two sites:

• http://www.pixelofink.com
• http://ereadernewstoday.com/category/free-kindle-books/

I’ve found that mysteries, particularly thrillers, read better than other categories on the Kindle.

The Good: 

• one can change the size of the font… if you have bad eyesight this is a big plus.
• you can carry  a lot of books at one time without hurting your back

The Bad:

• Organizing of books on the Kindle is minimal and doesn’t hold across all the apps on which you might read them.  The effect of this is that you really won’t like to have hundreds of books on your Kindle.
• You can’t have multiple books open at once for comparison.
• You don’t really own the books so you can’t resell them.

Via Peoria Illinois Public Library:

[http://bit.ly/PeoriaSciFiBookClub]

I knew I had seen this somewhere… turns out to be through the Peoria Public Library!

SciFi-Fantasy Book Club

10/11/10 7:00PM – 8:30PM

I find myself being more and more tired of “empires” in SF & F.

I ask myself why.

Why do we read what we do?

I ask myself how.

How does story serve whatever function it has?

I ask myself what.

What is the function?

====

Empire stories serve a powerful function for some people.

Myself, I’m tired of them.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe empires are cool.  Maybe that’s the future & I should quit whining about it.

That’s what I always liked about America: they threw off the empire.  But what the hell would they know… that was over two hundred years ago.  Bunch of rubes living in the woods.

If you’re wondering why I’m suddenly reading Dean Koontz…  I’ve had occasion to read him in the past,  but in the past two years I came across several of his books in the “free” pile.

Then about two weeks ago someone left six boxes of books on the free table at the local public library… and there were about 10 of his novels in the mix.  I grabbed them all, brought them home, and have been working on them since.

It’s just a matter of degree.

Paranoia is a survival instinct.

Reading is guided hallucination.

I’ve read some good “SF-like” books by Dean Koontz; yesterday I read large chunks of “Intensity”. I liked the first few pages, but then it seemed to degenerate into a torture fest.

Read the last part of it, where the heroine escapes from the torturer. The rest of it seemed to wallow in awfullness.