Everyone should have a long book on their Kindle that they otherwise would never read. Then, when you don’t feel like starting a whole new book on your Kindle, you dig into a small piece of your long book. And stop. As the years pass, you may eventually finish your long book (or not).
The long book on my Kindle is John Calvin’s The Institutes of the Christian Religion. It’s impressive. I don’t agree with Calvin, either theologically or temperamentally, but he is an extremely sharp thinker and writer, too often neglected for his extreme “Calvinism.”
After three years, I’m about eighteen percent finished. And someday I hope to read more works by Calvin, although not someday anytime soon.
What is the long book on your Kindle?
Addendum: Kevin Drum comments.
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The six volumes of Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”
Mommsen’s history of Rome has been my companion for weeks.
Gibbon here too – I thought it was the obvious choice. But for me the great temptation of the Kindle is to turn it into a mini-library, so I’ve also got (amongst others) The Origin of Species and The Bible, and will probably get the Illiad. Hurray for progress! I’ll take an easily portable library over a flying car any day.
A few months back the had the entire six volume Kindle set on sale at Amazon for $5.99……could not resist that deal
Same here! still just 12% complete…
Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad”. Twain read in short doses is just fine.
Twain’s “Following the Equator” was an earlier “book in the background”.
You might like “‘around the world in the yacht sunbeam” (if you have not already found it.)
Both Homer poems and Virgil’s Aeneid
Those 3 (I did finish the Iliad) and the Divine Comedy.
Brothers K
once advised to re-read it every ten years or so, like the “always just there” plan better
The Holy Bible. Three chapters a day.
John Ryan’s “Living Wage”. Not a long book by any means, but it is the one I am currently reading in bits and pieces.
Sherlock Holmes and/or Wooster and Jeeves stories
Gibbon and Homer’s Odyssey
Mine is Man, Economy, and State, but a few hundred pages in, I feel I am unlikely to ever finish. I expected more.
“This, reader, is an honest book.”
Michel de Montaigne, of course.
Shogun, but I’m actually about halfway through. Also, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire Series, which I am re-reading.
Montaigne (25% and it is astonishing how selective his quotations are) and Amadis of Gaul (not even close)
Two:
Gibbons’ “Decline and Fall”
Karl Popper “The Logic of Scientific Discovery”
and, of course “Brothers K”.
Plus, just finished “Anna Karenina”!
I have a paper copy of Mathematics for the Million that I’d like to have on my Kindle, but it doesn’t seem to be available. It’s a great book to read a chapter or so at a time, but it’s too big to haul around easily.
Wow, I’ve got that book too. Mine is a red hardcover and probably about 60 years old. I think I got it from one of my old girlfriend’s dad about thirty years ago. Haven’t looke at it in about 15 years.
That’s the second edition, which was the first to have an index. Unfortunately, the third edition replaced all of the figures drawn by Horrabin with figures drawn in a more modern style. I do not care for the third edition at all, but if this book were available for Kindle it would probably be the third edition.
I would love to switch over my H.L. Mencken _The American Language_ to the Kindle but for some crazy reason, that version is 40 dollars. So, paper it stays. (Well, there does appear to be a very poorly OCR’d version for six bucks. I’ll continue to hold out.)
Heck, I’ve been reading that one in nibs and nubs since college. (Almost 20 years!)
Mine is Les Miserables (Julie Rose translation) — 20%. Might I say that, for anyone interested in that sort of thing, John Calvin’s commentaries are less exacting, and just as well written, as the Institutes and well worth a read, in just the “dip into” reading style TC suggests.
Les Mis for me too.
Me too, though I’m reading Les Mis in an old public domain unabridged English version from Project Gutenberg. (I compared it with a sample of one of the modern versions when I decided I wanted to read it, and the old free one was the clear winner IMO.) 42% complete in about a year’s worth of reading.
War & Peace. Started it while sitting in court waiting for jury duty. Have made, to be polite, sporadic progress since then.
The real questino is what kind of a donation Jeff Bezos had to make to the Mercatus Center to change the post from its original title “What is your long generic non-branded electronic reading device book?”
I spoke to a translator of War & Peace at a dinner party once, and complained that I was pressed to finish it. He told me I could just skip a hundred pages ahead if I was bored.
Mine is the Mishneh Torah.
moby dick, which is so good that it could swallow my whole life.
next up, i was thinking spinoza, if i could find a decently-formatted copy.
The zone of privacy for religious belief was I think ultimately endorsed by Pope Leo XIII, probably one of the few people who could have read Spinoza’s Ethics in the original Latin. Is the book worth reading other than for this central idea?
I wouldn’t call that the “central idea” of Spinoza’s Ethics…most centrally, it’s a long argument for pantheism.
Ou peut-être c’était athéisme. Je ne sais pas.
The Collected Works of Sir Walter Scott: So far, I’ve only read Guy Mannering
Postwar
I also have the Institutes, along with the collected works of Jonathan Edwards.
I bought “Gotham” by Burrows and Wallace when it was on sale for a buck or so. I’ve barely started it, and it’s intimidating, but it’s on the Kindle for someday.
The Philokalia (Complete Text). It was a long book on the shelves for a while and now on the Kindle. Been reading pieces parts for over 20 years now.
Not on my Kindle, but Goedel, Escher and Bach by Douglas Hofstadter is the book by my bed that has been there for 5 years and will continue to be there for 5 more years. Great book, too long and it takes too long to read (and think about) each page.
Great book, and an example of one that almost has to be read in its paper form.
I can certainly imagine an worthwhile e-version, with high quality recordings of the music to listen to, tools to make the proofs more accessible, hyperlinks, etc. But yeah, it sure seems like a standard lo-res text dump would be a serious downgrade to the book.
William Trevor – The Collected Stories
I recently downloaded Bleak House, which I did dip into over time. I ended up finishing it, though, so I guess it doesn’t count. I will say the new Kindle’s “time left in this book” feature is alternately motivating and maddening, particularly when it seems to move backwards. I will also say that the new Kindle’s updated search features are very handy for looking up incidental characters in Victorian novels whose story you’ve forgotten.
There are a lot of abandoned books on my Kindle. Ones I may dip back into over time: collected works of Mark Twain and Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise, which I like, but really needs to be accompanied with an exploration of the music he is writing about. Other someday books: Gibbons, Caro, and more of the Taylor Branch history books.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. However I am not convinced that the version I have has, as claimed, been translated into English.
Having studied Hegel at university, your comment made me smile and I wanted you to know that! That might be the only thing philosophers can agree on…
Question for the commenters: What is your favorite source for **well-formatted** out of copyright books? Maybe this should be two questions: what is your favorite source for free copies, and what is your favorite source for nominally priced copies (say $0.49-$1.99)?
I’ve been plowing through some old Jules Verne.
Project Gutenberg is the obvious nominee here.
Amazon sells more than a few Project Gutenberg copies, as well, generally for free.
I love Project Gutenberg, but at least as they read on my Android’s Kindle reader, they definitely would not qualify as well-formatted. Typesetting mistakes are very common.
Project Gutenberg is excellent, but you will find many treasures free of charge (or almost) on Amazon as well. Use the filtering function, and Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought will help you further.
A lot of formatting work has gone into the books at mobileread.com. I believe that the books at feedbook.com and manybooks.net have also had formatting work done. All public domain and free.
The Archives of Marginal Revolution.
“Mystical City of God” by Maria de Agreda. I pick a chapter at random and read it (they are short). I think Calvin would have benefitted from it tremendously. There are free copies for download on the web if you look around.
Ada or Ardor by Nabokov. You can’t read much of it in one go because the brilliance leaves you breathless. No I mean actually breathless so you think you may just have a heart attack if you read a paragraph more and I have never had the courage to try.
Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations”, not long at all but readable in small bites and almost every line in it bears repeating.
Democracy in America – Volumes 1 & 2 by Alexis De Tocqueville and Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.
I, too, work through De Tocqueville. I am also somewhere in volume 2 of Runciman’s History of the Crusades.
De Tocqueville for me. It’s amazing how many things he got right, and also amazing which things he got spectacularly wrong.
“Thinking, Fast and Slow” – I normally get through books at a quick clip, but this one has turned into a long read for me.
The Cambridge Medieval History volumes 1-5 by J.B.Bury, Length: 4055 pages (estimated).
I also have The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Collection of all his adventures, 9 Volumes in one Book) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Length: 1743 pages (estimated), and Complete Works of Charles Dickens (Illustrated)
Middlemarch, it took me over a year to finish. Now Les Miserables.
Bleak House
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. Most of it is great, but I can only read a few of them before I need a break.
I have Sherlock Holmes and the Bible for this. And the Iliad on iPod; it’s really good in 20 minute walk-to-work chunks between other Audible downloads.
The Origin of Species.
Grant’s Memoirs.
Two, actually:
Collected works of William Shakespeare, maybe half of the way through. Only planning to read the plays, I find many of the sonnets tedious (a few are marvelous, though).
Churchill’s series, starting with The Gathering Storm (which is the only one I have finished so far)
Hippolyte Taine “History of English Literature”.
This is a great idea. I was going to go for Churchill’s History of the English Speaking People but can’t find it on Kindle… Will go with his WWII history instead.
Amazing Spider Man: The Complete Collection
Gotham. Purchased in Dec 2010.
Cryptonomicon
Timbuctoo by Tahir Shah.
$50 in hardcover, $3 on the Kindle.
Oh, and the complete Oz series.
I believe I also have Gibbon on there. Wealth of Nations (yeah, I’ve never actually read it), Origin of Species, some other good ones from Gutenburg.
But I find I don’t use the Kindle much anymore now that the new has worn off. It’s good for travelling, but we don’t travel that much. Otherwise I still prefer paper. I doubt I’ll get far far on any of these.
I read Wealth of Nations (well, most of it…) in college, from an old bound edition that was probably ~100 years old. It smelled just like library. It was how that book was meant to be read. I imagine Gibbon is best experienced the same way.
Maybe the Kindle 3 will have scratch n sniff.
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