Resolutions

In my on-going quest to improve myself, I made a set of New Year's resolutions that I thought would be especially helpful and at least somewhat achievable. Don't ask me how they're going. I will simply stare at you blankly and recall the words of Sarah regarding why she doesn't make New Year's resolutions.

Nonetheless, one of the few that I HAVE managed to keep is my goal to read a book a month for this entire year. I had an e-reader app that I downloaded from Amazon specifically to read the book The Long Emergency (I'll review it here at some point, I'm sure) and I've downloaded a few other books for it as well.

Sarah has a highly unfavorable opinion of Amazon stemming largely from Amazon's refusal to facilitate payments to Wikileaks following their latest round of releases embarrassing the US government as well as a general disdain for the larger corporate giants. And while I share her point of view, I can be rather lazy and I tend to let expedience win the day, the expedient thing in this case being to continue using Amazon to download books as opposed to downloading Borders's app, sending them all my credit card information, hoping they don't reject my payment because I'm overseas and trying to buy the files electronically from a location too far from my credit cards' registered address (as deviantArt and iTunes have done), yada yada yada.

After careful consideration, though, I acquiesced and downloaded Borders's e-reader application (a free download, by the way). When I opened Borders Desktop for the first time, I was greeted with a happy surprise: five books that are part of the public domain are included with the application! When you download Borders's Desktop application, the file includes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,Dracula, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Grimms' Fairy Tales, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

I thought this was a really nice touch on the part of Borders. I mean, yeah, the books are in the public domain, so they're not losing any money, but the Kindle app included zero books in its initial download, public domain or otherwise. As a result of Borders's generosity, I am now rereading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (unabridged, I might add; no hypersensitive politically correct editors have taken their red pens to this version). So, if you are in the market for an e-reader application for your laptop, check out Borders. Even if you've read all the titles they include, they are nice to have around.

Probably not what you were looking for as a second post, Corey, but don't you worry. I'll tell the tale of how Death and Coyotes got its name sooner or later. Ciao, all!