I wish to note this horror publicly: Someone has written in the library book I'm reading. The only mitigating factor is that it's in pencil, but I feel like reading with an eraser in hand.

Oh now see, for me that's always interesting, given that the previous reader had something perceptive to say.

We had a favorite used book store in a university town, and one weekend when we were in, a notable faculty member's estate had just cleared. He left all his "formal" library to the school's library. His working library wound up at the used books. Poetry and short stories and novels--all the standdard English and American writers, some translations from German and Russian. And in every volume there was highlighted text, margin notes in tiny script, sometimes wrapping around the block of print from a side margin up to the header or down to the footer. As most of the material was fairly familiar, the notes were far more interesting than the text--and gave new insights and perspectives. Fascinating.

A note scribbled in pencil, though, "This sux!" is perhaps not as thrilling.

I've seen where "helpful" people have put in notes saying "Don't read this part!" before a sex scene--or simply got out a marker and crossed out the offending passage. And then they blithely return the book, probably filled with satisfaction at having improved the world.

My favorite was reading a "Jane Austen" mystery from the library where someone had scribbled "Jane Austen is probably turning in her grave!" I agreed with the sentiment since I really didn't like Jane Austen as detective, but thought that Jane would probably hate someone writing in library books more.

Well, yeah, library books. I somehow missed that part of the "writing in books" complaint. A burning offense, for sure, with a publicly-owned book.

So, I get a Kindle for a work project, through May at least, and it arrived today! Hit me with your top 10 Kindle tips. This is the wifi-only, cheap-ass one - I am working with an English professor and he is going to have all the texts for his class on the Kindle, and every student gets one (on loan).

I don't have any tips. I just read read read read. I can't explain the phenomena of why books sat gathering dust on my nightstand, but I tear through them on the Kindle.

There was a fellow paperback mystery reader at my old library branch who would copy edit books -- in pencil, but sometimes wrongly.

Go here and roll around in the freebie goodness (left column). Also, if you want to convert stuff easily to mobi format (from epub, lit, pdf, etc) download a program called Calibre. Then just copy files to your kindle!

In amusing Kindle news, the Kindle store thinks I live in the UK and no amount of resetting my address or transferring my account to amazon.com will convince it otherwise. Because one time about 2.5 years ago I bought some books for a friend living in England who had a baby, and had the books shipped directly.