Kay Hudson

I’ve been pretty good about not buying more paper books lately. Given that I only manage to read about one paper book a week, I’m already four or five years behind. I haven’t been as restrained with my Kindle downloads. The combination of low price and instant availability is often too much to resist, and many of my friends publish electronically these days. I can’t keep up with all of them, either. I can barely keep up with my own writing.

So I have a few unread books waiting on my Kindle. Oh, who do I think I’m kidding? I have dozens of unread books on my Kindle, so many I don’t even know what’s there. (The Kindle app on my computer is great for that, by the way. I can see all the covers spread across my computer monitor any time I’m brave enough to look.)

Of course it doesn’t help that I get daily emails from BookBub and Amazon Daily Deals. At least once or twice a week something pops up that I can’t resist. This morning it was Patrick Dennis’ hilarious Auntie Mame. I have a paperback copy of Auntie Mame on one of the high shelves in the living room (along with most of Dennis’ other books). It’s so old that the spine is brittle, the pages yellow, and the original price was 95 cents. I’d be afraid to try to read it again. Now I can read it on my Kindle.

A day or two ago I downloaded Petticoat Detective, by Margaret Brownley. I read many of Brownley’s books back in the 90s, light-hearted American historical romances. Then she dropped out of the game for awhile, resurfacing in recent years with an inspirational publishing house. Her latest release, about a female Pinkerton agent working undercover in a brothel, looks like fun.

Southern Comforts, by Nan Dixon, is a book I’ve been looking forward to reading ever since I read the first few chapters as a contest judge a few years ago. On the other hand, Ghostly Paws, by Leighann Dobbs, is a mystery with paranormal elements, by an author I’ve never read, but her ad on BookBub was too tempting to resist.

Gunpowder Alchemy is a steampunk novel set in China, by Jeannie Lin, an author whose China-set historical romances I have read and enjoyed. This is something different for Lin, and I’m looking forward to reading it. In recent weeks I’ve also added a couple of paranormal romances (Lorenda Christensen’s Til Dragons Do Us Part and Anna Richland’s First To Burn) and a mystery that I first read long ago (and saw dramatized recently on PBS), Agatha Christie’s Halloween Party.

My Kindle app tells me that I have 263 titles on my Kindle, and I’ve only read a fraction of them. I’ll never catch up, but I’ll never run out of reading material, either.