Reunited And It Feels So Good…The Kindle Edition.

Yesterday, while cleaning out the garage, I found an old Kindle crammed inside a box. I had a Kindle many years ago, when they first came out, but stopped it using not long after I had it.

I plugged the Kindle in and was surprised to see it working again. After charging, my wife noticed it was full of kid’s books and then I remembered my Mom buying my boys Kindles for Christmas one year and this must have been one of theirs instead of mine.

As teenagers now, they have zero interest in a Kindle, but I excitedly got it up and running again and downloaded a book to start reading, Michaelangelo Matos’ 33 1/3 book on Prince’s album, Sign O’ The Times. I immediately fell back in love with the reading experience on a Kindle.

I have storage issues at home due to having too many books and records. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m selling records via my Discogs store, but books are another issue. I love reading books and have kept so many that I’m running out of room. But the idea of just getting rid of them, Marie Kondo style, stresses me out.

We’re watching the Fran Lebowitz special on Netflix and she talks about having an issue finding an apartment to house her 10,000 book collection. I don’t have 10,000 of anything but I could understand her willingness to keep such a great collection on hand.

But I also understand that I need to move things along to make room for new items so I’ve been donating books I haven’t touched in years to our local thrift store. Of course, a new book or two arrives each month to go right back in the place I just freed up.

Also, one of my goals for 2021 is to spend less time on social media. I think they are time wasters. Instead I’ve been listing as many items as possible for sale in my Discogs store and enjoying that process.

But I need another outlet to avoid social media and for me that’s reading a book. Finding the Kindle puts a different kind of device in my hands that keeps me focused on something more productive. I love that all I can do on the Kindle is read. There aren’t any pings or notifications to distract me. I don’t have any apps that I can jump to and forget to go back to reading. If I bought an iPad for reading, I would find myself getting distracted with all of the other options the iPad offers. With the Kindle, I simply read.

By the way, if you haven’t picked up the reissue of Prince’s Sign O’ The Times LP, do so. It has been remastered and sounds amazing. Prince albums always sound a little on the shrill side for me but the remaster added in the bass that I think better rounds out the sound for a great listening experience!

I still love holding a book, marking up the pages, taking notes and finding the perfect bookmark to keep my place. But there are books that are fun to read that I don’t necessarily need to forever own a physical copy of and now being able to read those on my Kindle is a wonderful thing.