Such a thrilling article, I hope you’re not too bored.
I’ve stopped taking physical books when we travel overseas. They get too heavy and when I’ve finished I have to decide whether to take them home again or leave them somewhere. Instead I took none with me, instead loading up my phone with many pdf files of books and theses making sure I could read them using Digital Editions. What I didn’t do was try to read one book over a period of days. I waited until I was in Berlin before trying that. It was a nightmare. Sometimes it lost my place, many times it closed the pdf and I had to find it again in the long list of pdf files I copied to my phone. It changed the order of the list on so many, many occasions and I had to find it sometimes at the top, sometimes in the middle and sometimes at the bottom. I did eventually finish reading one book in that manner, Nelson’s Folly by Oliver Greeves.
I then moved onto BorrowBox, the app provided by some libraries around Australia. I have it linked to the Glen Eira Council Library. It is an app I’ve used a few times in the past and it’s worked well for me. So I started off by trying to finish The Maze Runner series by James Dasher. I had previously bought the second book in the series The Scorch Trials. I did try reading them in order, but the third book, Death Cure, wasn’t available as someone else had it on loan so I read Kill Order instead. Kill Order is actually a sequel to The Maze Runner series and explains quite a bit. There are more books in the series, but they didn’t seem available as ebooks in the library.
I ran a search in the app for James Dashner and found another series he’s written in. It’s called Infinity Ring. Each book is written by a different author and I managed to download and read most of the series. I still have a couple more to read for completion sake. Another series where the complete ebook series didn’t seem available at the library.
I wracked my brains and found The Tangled Web by Tea Cooper. A nice little historical fiction. I’ve read two other of her books and will be happy to read more historical fiction by her. She blends facts and history beautifully. This time she brought in haemophilia into the worlds of Sydney and Maitland. We got to see boys in Maitland with no money and no home being given a home and the potential for jobs. It was good.
The last book I borrowed was book 1 in The 39 Clues series. The Maze of Bones series is written by Rick Riordan and is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for The Infinity Ring as the series has similarities to The 39 Clues series.
In all I think I read ten books during the month. Not a bad effort considering we were on holidays, going to museums, cafes, seeing people, travelling between cities and countries via the magic of the train! It was lovely to get back to physical books, but I do think that sometime in the future I’ll probably be buying a proper ebook reader and making the transition. But, not this year.