Thursday 28th October

K is out this evening, as is becoming more and more usual, and I sit and finish Chuck Palahniuk's Pygmy on the Kindle. The plan when I bought the Kindle was to try and buy a new book each payday and have it finished by the following payday - a plan mostly born out of frustration with my slow reading rate. I envy K, and all other tube commuters, that hour or so of trapped time she has to sit and read every day - while I (though enjoying the fact that I live only a 10-minute walk from work) have to grab ten minutes here and there to slowly crawl through a book. For example, Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth ended up taking me over a year to read, in between more manageable paperbacks.

Since having the Kindle though, I've now read The Fry Chronicles and Pygmy in under a month - and as we tick over to payday at midnight I'm on the Kindle store buying something new. I download a sample of The Accidental Billionaires, the book The Social Network is based on, but find the writing style not to my taste (I get annoyed with non-fiction books that try to read like novels, with imagined speech and dramatised locations) so decide not to buy it. However, my itchy trigger fingers flicks the select button and I end up buying the book by mistake. Nightmare!

I run through to the other room and quickly send off an email begging for a refund from Amazon. I'm pretty sure it'll get sorted fairly speedily - surely this sort of thing happens all the time? Sure enough, the book is soon gone from my machine and I can find something I really want to read. I settle on Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything - a layperson's guide to science that I've been keen on reading for a few years now. It's only £4.00 or so, and I'm reading it less than a minute later. This truly is the future, my friends.