One more thing and then I'll shut up

About the Kindle, I mean.

See, this is how my nightstand looked not too long ago:

 

You see the problem here, right? That lamp is FAR too short! No, wait ... that's not it. The problem is that I took my life in my hands every single night, lest that towering double stack o' books should topple over and kill me in my sleep.

I'm a book hoarder, is what I'm saying. I cannot resist a clearance rack, a library sale, a thrift store bookshelf. Cheap books are my crack; I buy them in bulk and let them pile up in sedimentary layers. Occasionally I even read one! But for every one book I read, I tend to buy three or five or twelve more.

It's a sickness, and I'm here to tell you: the Kindle is NOT a cure. Nope. Not even.

Because while I've managed to whittle that towering stack o' ACTUAL books down considerably since that photo was taken, here are the books that currently reside on my Kindle:

• Steig Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. This is the book I'm reading now. So exciting!
• Robin Mather's The Feast Nearby. That's the book I most recently finished (highly recommended, by the way). Did I delete it from my Kindle when I was done, knowing that Amazon would store it for me and I could re-download it whenever I wanted to for free? No, I did not. I moved it to a "finished" folder instead. BECAUSE I'M A HOARDER.
• Johnny Virgil's The Snitch, Houdini and Me. Haven't read this one yet, but very much looking forward to it.
• Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games. My kids have read all the books in this trilogy (along with her earlier Gregor the Overlander series) and loved them, and I want to read them too, but I'll be darned if I'm going to go digging around through all the crap in their rooms looking for them.
• Ransom Riggs's Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. It looked interesting.
• Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Because Michael Cunningham's The Hours made me want to read it.

So that's not too bad, right? A book I'm reading now, a book I've recently finished, and a few new books on deck to keep me busy.

Oh, but people. It gets so much worse. I also have all of THESE books on my Kindle. Because they were free! If cheap books are my crack, free books are my crystal meth, or something! I don't know! Stay off drugs, kids!

• Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
• L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
• Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre
• Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White
• Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment
• George Elliot's Middlemarch
• Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Understood Betsy
• Jack London's The Call of the Wild
• Jack London's White Fang
• Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Circular Staircase
• Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island
• Elinor Pruitt Stewart's Letters of a Woman Homesteader
• Bram Stoker's Dracula
• Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace

And to top it off? I have sample chapters from all of THESE books loaded onto my Kindle. So I can decide whether I like them enough to buy and read the whole book(s):

• Sarah Bird's The Gap Year
• Emma Donoghue's Room
• Barry Estabrook's Tomtatoland
• Tina Fey's Bossypants
• Tana French's Faithful Place
• Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones & Butter
• Deborah Harkness's A Discovery of Witches
• Eleanor Henderson's Ten Thousand Saints
• Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts
• Paul Murray's Skippy Dies
• Carolyn Parkhurst's The Nobodies Album
• Ann Patchett's State of Wonder
• Donald Ray Pollock's The Devil All the Time
• Mary Doria Russell's Doc
• Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• Patti Smith's Just Kids
• John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley
• S.J. Watson's Before I Go To Sleep

Um, so yeah. You can take the girl out of the library sale, but you can't take the entire freaking library out of the girl's e-book reader, apparently. Heh.

Can I get a 12-step program up in here?