Amazon Kindle 3: A Review

For the past one year, I've only been reading ebooks and have not bought a single copy of the print book. I read my ebooks on my computer, and there were some issues I had to bear with. For example, the glare of the screen. Reducing the brightness doesn't help as that means the text becomes less readable. My eyes got tired from the hours of reading, and the whites started to develop red 'lines'. 

Then there's the non-portability of the ebooks. I no longer had a book with me to read when I'm waiting for someone or for my turn at some place. And not to mention the computer getting hot from being left on for more than 12 hours a day.


Those became issues of the past when I got my Kindle. The Kindle uses the E-Ink technology which makes reading easy on the eyes. It is very light, and now I carry 300 ebooks (the storage capacity is 3500 ebooks) everywhere with me in my handbag so that I'll have a different book to read for different moods. I would not have been able to do that with print copies.


The Kindle lets you look up the definition of a word without leaving the page you're reading, and if you're feeling lazy and just want to close your eyes and let someone read to you, just activate the text-to-speech and let the Kindle read to you.


And if you like to listen to music while you read, all from the same device, just copy the MP3 files into the music folder in the Kindle. The Kindle is wifi enabled, and comes with a browser. I find the browsing experience extremely primitive though. 


The Kindle does best what it was designed for --- reading ebooks. It really delivers! 

Book Review: The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended to by a bodyguard of lies" ~ Sir Winston Churchill

When I accessed my blog today, I was shocked to see that the last post was more than a month ago. Time flies without the courtesy of a memo. And what have I been doing for the past one month? Well, I'm not going to bore you with the minute, mundane details of my life. Suffice to say, I was minding my own business, and perhaps a friend's or two's.....yes, I can be quite interested in my friends' lives, to put it mildly.  

Hang on....what has that got to do with a book review post? Nothing. I'm just rambling.

When I buy books, I tend to stick to authors I know. Reading can be a rather expensive hobby in Malaysia, if you are a voracious reader like me, so it makes sense to stick to what you know. However, when a book is given to you for free, you are less picky. And that was how I got my first chance to read Daniel Silva's works, a free Kindle ebook, courtesy of a friend S.

To be honest, The Unlikely Spy isn't his first book that I read. I read The Confessor, and liked it enough to take the trouble to google him and found that The Unlikely Spy was his first book, published in 1996, and which some of his fans think is still his best work yet.

While some of the characters and events are fictional, The Unlikely Spy is based on very real events during World War II. The very complex and detailed deception conjured up by the British Intelligence totally fascinated me. Imagine producing fake army tanks, fictitious army units, and so on. It's one big massive deception that rivals Hollywood blockbuster movies. 

The story was cinematic in its scope. I felt I was watching a Hollywood blockbuster instead of reading an ebook on the small Kindle screen. I was so involved in the story that I took the Kindle with me to the treadmill when it was time to work out at the gym. It's definitely a page-turner and if you would like to learn how the British fooled the Nazis and caused Hitler to make all the wrong decisions, pick up this book. The book is based on:-  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude