The Stories So Far

[stoutfellow]

It's been about two and a half days since I bought my Kindle; I've been loading it up, at intervals, with downloads mostly from Project Gutenberg. At this point, I've put 49 books on it, grouped into collections as follows.

Fantasy (6): E. Nesbit, Five Children and It; James Stephens, The Crock of Gold; Ernest Bramah, Kai Lung's Golden Hours; Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book; James Barrie, Peter Pan; Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History, Books I-IX. (Maybe it's a little unfair to put Saxo here, but what he wrote - at least this part of it - sure isn't history.)

Exploration (2): William Dampier, A Voyage to New Holland and A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland. (Dampier was a pirate, explorer, and naturalist; I read a biography of him a while back.)

Palliser (6): Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, and The Duke's Children. (I hived this series off separately; I imagine I'll do likewise with other longish series.)

Math (6): David Hilbert, The Foundations of Geometry; Evariste Galois, Oeuvres Mathematiques; Felix Klein, On Riemann's Theory of algebraic functions; Karl Friedrich Gauss, General Investigations of Curved Surfaces; George Boole, Investigation of the Laws of Thought; William Burnside, Theory of Groups of Finite Order. (These are classics. I went for translations where possible, but the Galois was only available in French.)

Mystery (5): Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of ..., The Return of ...; G. K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown and The Wisdom of Father Brown. (I actually have a couple of volumes of Doyle in paper, but they aren't complete. These three have, I think, all of the short stories; I'm not sure about the novels.)

Adventure (5): Rudyard Kipling, Kim and The Man Who Would Be King; Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood; Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel; Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda. (I've been wanting the last three for quite a while. I have a lot of Kipling, but not these two novels until now.)

Science (3): Galen, On the Natural Faculties; Charles Darwin, The formation of vegetable mould; Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology. (The Galen I bought on a whim. The Darwin is the paper on earthworms that first established his reputation the last paper he ever wrote. The Lyell is a classic, championing uniformitarianism against the then-popular theory of catastrophism.)

History (2): Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution; "Charles Johnson", Pirates. ("Johnson" is a pseudonym; he may have been Daniel Defoe, but this is disputed. This is an abridged version of a longer work; I couldn't find the longer one.)

Essays (4): G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered; Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler; Walter Scott, Journal; Samuel Pepys, Diary. (This is a hodgepodge category of prose nonfiction that doesn't fit anywhere else. I have one volume - one year - of Pepys in paper, but couldn't resist a chance at the complete Diary. I'll probably be getting more of Chesterton's essay collections.)

General Fiction (6): Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers and A Tale of Two Cities; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; George Eliot, Silas Marner; William Thackeray, Vanity Fair; Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations and Poems. (Another hodgepodge. The Landor doesn't fit here comfortably - it's a one-of-a-kind work, AFAIK - but here it'll stay for the time being.)

Science Fiction (4): Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward; H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon and The Island of Dr. Moreau; Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon; and, Round the Moon.

So, that's the State of the Kindle as of this evening.

Comments

[mmegaera]

You're doing exactly what I did when I received my Kindle as a gift about a year and a half ago. I've got stuff on mine that I downloaded from PG back then that I still haven't read yet [g].

BTW, Kenneth Branagh recorded a terrific audio version of Pepys' diary, if you think you might be interested in such things.

[stoutfellow]

I've got stuff on mine that I downloaded from PG back then that I still haven't read yet [g].

This would not be significantly different from my record with paper books. Faster intake tempo, maybe.

[mmegaera]

True. I've got stuff I bought at Powells years ago that I still haven't read, too. Somehow, though, even though I've only filled a small percentage (even with several hundred books) of my Kindle's memory, it still feels more limited to me than paper books. Which doesn't make sense. I've probably got more room on my Kindle than I have storage space in my condo [g].

[stoutfellow]

Out of curiosity, what sorts of things did you stock up on?

[mmegaera]

I picked up a bunch of children's books I'd remembered reading as a kid, and I've read those. I picked up some history, and some mythology (I was looking for material on non-Western countries), some of which I've read. And I picked up some adult (as in non-children's) classics, some of which I've read.