Final Thoughts on Kindle Unlimited

I've dipped into Kindle Unlimited whenever I could get a good deal, and have had mixed feelings as you can tell from this post, and this post.

Since I'd learned the trick of making a KU curated list, I had much better luck this time going straight to the books that were worthwhile. As I've stated before, I pay almost nothing for the KU subscription, but end up reading voraciously to "get my money's worth." Obviously, I didn't give some of these books their due, and ended up buying two of them to re-read and savor more fully. From most enjoyable to least, here are the titles that I read in December, January and February:

Cinderella - stunningly illustrated by K.Y. Craft

Ask of the Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life by Grace Hamman

Portrait of a Murder: A Christmas Crime Story by Anne Meredith (vintage detective fiction)

Unfinished Portrait by Mary Westmacott (aka Agatha Christie)

Baking for Two by Tracy Kabiku (and 7 other cookbooks)

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Heroes of the City of Man - Peter Leithart (guide to the Greek classics)

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein

Behind Barbed Wire and High Fences by Helen Angeny (WWII POW memoir)

Rochester's Wife - D. E. Stevenson (disappointing fiction from one of my favorite light authors)

I checked out two retellings of  classic books that were AI generated (I didn't know it at the time), and they were as awful as you would expect.

I paid 99 cents for three months, but ended up spending $15 on books that I wanted to keep. So it came out to about $5 a month (the normal price is $12). I could have done worse. 

Blessings,

Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs

According to Alan Jacobs, as our society becomes more and more immersed in digital realities, we are losing our personal density. He wrote this book to encourage his audience to learn to think more deeply by reading more widely.

He begins by explaining why our thinking has become so thin. Because of the deluge of information pouring into our minds via screens, we must, of necessity, practice a form of informational triage. We simply cannot read everything so we choose those subjects which are immediately interesting, and topics which are generally written from the point of view of those with whom we agree.

There is no time to think about anything else. This preoccupation with the present, with no regard for history or past ideas, leads to a “lightweight” existence that is easily toppled by life’s hard knocks. Jacobs believes that reading old books (and grappling with their ideas) can give us a stability that is not easily shaken by each current event or recent mode of thinking.

Jacobs encourages us to read older books with a generosity toward the author, which means that instead of writing them off for being racist, sexist, white or male, etc., we need to be gracious toward them and give them more of your attention than you may at certain moments feel that they deserve – because you hope that something good will come of it. At the very least you hope for an expansion of your own understanding.

He writes, I believe that any significant increase in personal density is largely achieved through encounters with un-likeness. When we read something that startles us (or with which we disagree) we are naturally tempted to close the book. But if we disregard all past authors for differences we have with them, our pool of candidates for our attention will get smaller and smaller.  Eventually we get a nicely manageable collection of ideas, all of which are more or less the same. But this limited understanding of the world leaves us impoverished.

G.K. Chesterton’s argued that when we ignore the history and ideas of the past, we do so at our own peril. If the modern man is indeed the heir of all the ages, he is often the kind of heir who tells the family solicitor to sell the whole damned estate, lock, stock, and barrel, and give him a little ready money to throw away at the races or the nightclubs. (from his essay: On Man – Heir of All Ages)

I learned a lot from this book, but while reading, I had to practice what Jacobs preached. Although I sometimes disliked his disdainful tone, I kept going because his main emphases are ideas that are very important to me. If only he had been as generous to those with whom he disagrees (who are still living) as he is with writers of the past. 

Blessings,