Summer Reading

Frolicking around Sri Lanka for 17 days without internet left me with considerably more free time than I would have expected, but thankfully Kindle saved the day.  I managed to read 13 books (some new and some old) while on vacation!  Packing that many paperback books would have been prohibitively heavy; we had all of our stuff packed in backpacking packs, and I  never would have thought to pack so many.

Here's a run down of the books I read during our vacation:

A World I Never Made
A Tailor-Made Bride
*Making Waves: A Novel
A Chance In Time
Two Wars
*The Strange Case of Finley Jayne
Paid in Blood
Beyond The Bougainvillea
Pictures of the Mind: What the New Neuroscience Tells Us About Who We Are
*Syndrome
Eye of the God
Harry Potter (Book 1 and 2)

*Hands down great books (in my opinion)

Lest you think I spent over $100 on vacation reading, I snagged all of these books while they were free on Amazon.  It can be hard to get them because they aren't free for very long, but they have a great RSS feed of popular free books, which I mentioned a while back.

One of the best (or worst) aspects of the free Kindle books is that the first book in a series and a new author's first book tend to be free as a way to get exposure.  I've found several new authors and series this way, but the whammy is that the later books come at the typical $10 price.

Hopefully this gets any lofts reading plans out of my system, because it seems that the only thing I'm going to be reading for the next 3 weeks is research articles for projects.

Tragic Losses

Our trip led to two losses one major, the other minor.

The first was the death of Steve’s Kindle.  He accidently dropped it from the bedside table to the floor and the screen is a garbled mess.  This is a big loss because we use our Kindles all the time and getting a new one in Saudi isn’t possible because Amazon won’t ship them here.  For the last couple of weeks we’ve been sharing mine, which seems to be working well for now.

I’m so disappointed that the Kindle broke so easily because it’s a very easy accident to have.  Amazon has a video of a drop test, but I don’t think it’s very accurate if they are really so easily broken.

Loss number two was my fault as I accidently left my hat on the train from Milan to Malpensa.  In the end, it’s not a huge loss because I probably won’t need a hat again until fall and by that time we should be settled into the US.

Rocking my long lost hat at the Cairo Airport while waiting for our flight to Athens.

Not all was perfect in Italy, but these losses certainly didn't ruin our trip.

I bet you all thought this was going to be about William being single no more...