Just Browsing

When I firsted started working, my sister and I went on a trip to London. It was a charter that fit our needs to a T -- mainly it was inexpensive. We had a great time -- saw the Tower, Buckingham Palace, went to Mass at the Brompton Oratory and walked over to the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Our hotel was well situated for walking trips but was otherwise pretty charmless. It was one of those high-rises with cell-like rooms built for budget-minded travelers. I've stayed at similar lodgings in New York. But this hotel had a unique feature -- a refrigerator bar in our room. They are common now but this was thirty years ago And I'd never seen one before. We loved it. In the middle of the night you could have Coke and chips and being quite topsy turvy with time zones we frequently did.

Well, the Amazon Kindle reminds me of that refrigerator bar. You can get up in the middle of the night and order up whatever you fancy. Feel like a Nora Roberts or Michael Connelly well they have it. It's terrific technology. But here is my worry -- will the less-famous authors get selected during those nocturnal reads. The refrigerator bar only had the big-name brands and so I wonder how it will be with the Kindle. I guess I still want people to browse in bookshops and take a chance on a new author.

You can browse on Amazon. It's not tactile though it can be done. What you have to do is follow how a novel is tagged. I didn't know this until yesterday when a reader kindly tagged my novel, Men of Paradise, as 'gentle humor' I looked up all the books tagged as 'gentle humor' and knew they were just my cup of tea. So I'm heartened and venturing off into this new world where sometimes the unknown author gives you the biggest bang for your buck or pound in Margaret's case.