sunday salon: welcome to my Kindle!

The big news: I got a Kindle for Christmas! I was surprised; I cried. I profusely thanked nomadreaderboy! To no one's surprise, I love it! It has already changed my reading. First, I read the New York Times again. It's delivered automatically each morning when it hits the newsstand. It's wonderful to roll over and start reading the paper in bed each morning. Then, when the paper is finished, I click into the book I'm reading. As someone who used to carry at least one book (what if I finished it? I had to have something else to read) along with the paper and the New Yorker around, it's amazing to have all three in one place. 


In honor of my Kindle, here are a few bookish articles I read and enjoyed:

• Small Publisher Found It's Mission in Translation (12/26/09) - a fascinating look at Open Letter Books, a small publisher who only publishes translated works, which is a dying industry in the U.S. I have a copy of Season of Ash by Jorge Volpi, which is published by Open Letter, and I look forward to reading it.
• Titles of the Times (12/27/09) - Colum McCann, who one this year's National Book Award, writes a beautiful op-ed piece on the importance of books to his sense of time. Here's a snippet: "Fiction deals elegantly with issues that politics eventually wrestles with, corrupts, destroys, but nothing specific had been written to prepare me for President Obama. I wasn’t able to align him with any fiction, and yet it seemed that so much of literature has worked toward the moment. From Vladimir Nabokov to Aleksandar Hemon to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, American literature has always been prepared to take in the “other.” It has also allowed writers to hold onto their own country, so that they can have their hands in the warmth — or bitter cold — of both places."

I won't list all the books I'm added to my to read list based on their reviews, but perhaps my favorite part of the Kindle so far is how easy it makes it to read the Times each morning.