Finally Sold on Reading Ebooks

By ROB PATTERSON

Are you an avid reader like I am? It’s one of my favorite activities, a way to chill yet stimulate the mind, travel to other places and realms, meet interesting people, learn new things and enjoy engaging and interesting stories.

I grew up in a home where both parents read. Our living room had a wall with built-in bookshelves stuffed full of hardcover volumes. I loved going to the nearby library and roaming the stacks looking for book that struck my interest. A visit to the central library downtown, an elegant old building with a large central atrium, was like entering a magical realm. Is it any wonder that I became a writer and editor?

So, naturally, I love the tactile experience of reading an actual book, Hence it took me a while to warn up to ebooks. But since I started subscribing to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service my perspective has changed.

The precipitating factor was acquiring an iPad. It soon became where I would read news at times during the day, especially as I lay in bed in the evening.

Then I got an email from Amazon – I’m a Prime member – offering me a two-month trial for Kindle Unlimited, which features deals on ebooks and magazines. Plus access to 20 selected free books at a time. I figured, what the hey, I’ll give it a shot.

Pretty soon, I was off to the races, adding all kinds of titles that interested me. For the past three months prior to when I wrote this I wound up reading a slew of the offerings.

Admittedly, the free offerings are a widely mixed bag in terms of quality, from superb, well-reviewed books to stuff that might best be called guilty pleasures. Yet reading all has been a pleasure, and I love the immediacy and convenience of it.

One of the first that I read was a memoir by record producer John Simon, who helmed a number of pivotal albums over my years of listening The Band’s Music From Big Pink debut and its eponymous follow-up plus their Last Waltz live recording; Cheap Thrills by Big Brother & The Holding Company with Janis Joplin and the first records by Leonard Cohen and Blood, Sweat & Tears. His book is smart, breezy and insight – a delight to read.

Kindle Unlimited has also allowed me to indulge my interest in the Mafia. In “Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders,” two English journalist gather from a number of sources to show that the singer who I revere as a musical talent was a rather vile person, behaving like a scumbag mobster and consorting with such throughout his career. Another one I read for background on a screenplay I am writing is “The Genovese Mafia Crime Family.” Soon I will dig into “Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires”by mob expert Selwyn Raab and “Vegas and the Chicago Outfit: The Skimming of Las Vegas” – a city I loathe.

I’m currently in the midst of an oral history about the Fillmore East, and “Monkee Business: The Revolutionary Made-For-TV Band” managed with its detailed and perceptive account to inspire an upcoming column.

Kindle also has a series called “Hourly History,” with compact biographies of notable and notorious figures such as one I’ve downloaded on Joseph Goebbels, who made an evil art of the big lies as well as rabble-rousing hatred, prejudices and calls to violence that poison our current American politics. Also on tap from the series is a biography of Roy Orbison, who I not only interviewed but also spent delightful time socially backstage at a show with him and his father. Hence I can learn a bit more about both of them.

Also cued up for my consumption are David Halberstam’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural history “The Fifties,” which I’ve intended to read for some time as it’s the decade into which I was born. And after being wowed by the movie “Oppenheimer,” I will soon read “109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos.”

From seriously fun light reading to serious literature, it’s all available on Kindle Unlimited, for which I now pay $11.99 monthly – well worth it to me. And now that the right yet horribly wrong wing is on a book-banning crusade that lessens so many municipal and school libraries, let’s be thankful to digital technology and the internet for keeping precious books available to read.

Populist Picks

TV Series: “Classic Albums” – What prompted me to download John Simon’s ebook mentioned above was his sage commentary in the episode on The Band, one of 51 recordings where participants and commentators parse and discuss the recording of notable musical benchmarks. Endlessly fascinating and revelatory for a music buff like me.

TV Documentary: “Born in Chicago” – In the early 1960s, young White Chicago musicians like Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield and others learned their lessons in the blues from the city’s community of iconic Black bluesman. With Dan Ackroyd narrating and observations by Bob Dylan, Eric Burdon, Steve Miller, Chess Records scion Marshall Chess and others, it details the transfer of a musical and cultural tradition to a new generation.

Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email robpatterson054@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2024

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