Kindle Arrived: I Did Not Realize That Two of My Existing Books Are Already Available

Armed America and Black Demographic Data.  (The pricing on the latter means that it probably isn't going to sell well.)

Compared to this, the Kindle my boss has is a brick!  This is far thinner and lighter than any paperback.

UPDATE: And with a larger screen.  I downloaded Republic: A Novel of America's Future by Charles Sheehan-Miles, largely because the Kindle edition was free, and I wanted to see how well this worked for reading fiction.  The Kindle is growing on me as a way of doing pleasure reading.


Republic starts out a little clumsy; the author's method of explaining what is going on is a little pedestrian, but it is growing on me.  He is telling a pretty good story, with people that you care about, and I found myself staying up late reading this in bed, when I should have gone to sleep--and that's a good sign that someone is a storyteller.  Remember that there are great writers (in the technical sense that literary critics like), and there are great storytellers (like Stephen King), and sometimes you get both in one writer!

I do see a lot of annoying typos ("lot's" instead of "lots") and some rather surprising mistakes: the political party is "Democrat" with a capital "D"; newspaper titles are supposed to be italicized.  The dialog, however, is quite good.  Remember that real world dialog is never as grammatical or clear as novel dialog; we rely heavily on various non-verbal cues that prevent this from being a problem.  A novelist has to improve on how people really speak--but not so much that it sounds stilted or implausible, and Sheehan-Miles  is doing that pretty well.