Now that I have an ebook reader...

My daughter had a spare Kindle, and when I mentioned that such a thing might be useful for reading during load shedding, she sent it to me, and I've just finished reading this book on it:

The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Not quite fan fiction, but a story in the setting of the Mabinogion with some of its characters, like Math, son of Mathonwy, in background roles. I found it an enjoyable read, so I gave it 5 stars on GoodReads.

It's a book I've been hearing about for a long time. On GoodReads, people who liked books I liked also liked this one. In online forums where people discuss books, several people have mentioned this one, but I've not been able to find a copy in a library or bookshop. But I found one for the Kindle reader, which could also be read during load shedding.

I won't go on to the next book in the series immediately, because there are other series that I want to read as well, like The Dark is Rising. That one interests me more, not because it's better written or anything, but because several readers have compared my children's books to it.

Some people have asked why, if we can't find books locally, we don't just order them from suppliers like Amazon, which seem to have everything. Well, yes, that is where I got the first two books in the The Dark is Rising series, but getting physical copies of books from overseas is very expensive and a big schlep. If you don't collect them from the post office within a certain time, they send them back, and we don't go to the post office very often, partly because there isn't much post, and partly because the City Council of Tshwane has turned most of the parking space near the post office into no-stopping zones, and the few parking spaces left are 15 minutes only, if they aren't full, and it takes more than 15 minutes to collect overseas parcels from  the post office, so you are likely to return and find your car has already been towed away. So fetching the post is such a schlep we don't do it very often, and most of it is commercial bumpf anyway. 

So that gives ebooks two big advantages right now: (1) you can read them during load shedding and (2) you can get books that are unobtainable in hard copy.

But I still prefer hard copy books when I can get them, and when there's light to read them by.

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