Gateway to the Classics

I got a Kindle e-reader from Amazon this week (image from same), mostly because my Visa Card Rewards were burning a hole in my pocket and this was the most practical item offered. Once I got it, I was disappointed that Larry Correia's Monster Hunter books haven't made the leap to the technology yet. I'm not as romantic about the physical presence of books at my friend Carteach0; I'm a hermit packrat with the floor of my linen closet covered with paperbacks and a bookshelf full of hardcover books (and textbooks I refuse to sell back). If I could convert them all to e-books and free up that space, I would.

I grew up reading and still read contemporary science fiction (Asimov, Niven-Pournelle, Clarke, etc.), fantasy (Tolkien, Moorcock, Eddings, etc.), and military fiction (Griffin, Clancy, countless others), but never really read the Classics other than Amazing Stories from the hey-day of sci-fi. A friend just tipped me off to ManyBooks.Net, a repository of free classical literature digitized and archived by Project Gutenburg. Now I have no reason not to check out Zane Grey, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Mark Twain, and others. I've been reading Grey's "Desert Gold" for the past two nights at bedtime, and man, can he tell a story! As a special bonus, this story is set right where I live, in the Sonoran Desert.

I still have a stack of borrowed paperbacks I need to get through, so I think I'll alternate between the Kindle and the stack. Or maybe this will energize me to get through that stack first and return them so my friend doesn't get antsy about me hoarking his books for so long. My summer course load has been cut to three-quarter time by the cancellation of a class, so I really have no excuse not to pound out some reading this summer. Of course, I'll have to budget some time for screenwriting and screenplay reading, but this injection of the Classics ought to help that, right?