I've always enjoyed reading, but when Kindles first appeared I was a little dubious: Surely they couldn't replace the experience of a real book? Then I was given a kindle about a year ago by my lovely wife, and have to say it's just as good as a book, and better in many ways. Sure, there is something nice about a real book and when illustrations are needed a paper version is still better, but if it's novels you want then the Kindle is outstanding. One of the great things is that it's no longer necessary to buy a physical copy of a book, and in many cases it's not necessary to buy a book at all! Since buying a kindle I've bought fewer books, and read a lot more public domain books. Probably not the outcome Amazon were hoping for.

Public Domain books are those for which the copyright has expired under the life + 70 rule. That means that the earliest (formerly copyrighted) novels available in the US and UK were written before 1942. This relatively recently included The Great Gatsby, hence the sudden interest in making a movie. Amazon does offer some free editions of these books, particularly if you switch to the US store, but unsurprisingly they prefer to sell a version with a small introduction at the beginning, so the free versions can be quite hard to find.

Fortunately there are other places to find kindle books, which can be downloaded and copied onto your kindle. Feedbooks sell books in ePub, Kindle, or PDF formats, and have a collection of thousands of public domain books. Another great source is Project Gutenberg, with over 40,000 free eBooks. The problem is that faced with all this choice, probably more books than you could read in a lifetime, which books to read first? There some lists of popular books to start with, in which the Kama Sutra always seems to rank highly. Below are some of my favorites in no particular order. As you'll see I have a bit of a soft spot for adventure / travel stories.

• The Count of Monte Cristo is a brilliant book of adventure, intrigue and revenge. Especially revenge. Its the kind of book that makes you wish you could erase it from your brain so you could read it again without knowing what's going to happen next.
• Treasure Island is great fun, and even though it was originally intended for children it's very enjoyable for adults too. On the topic of islands, Robinson Crusoe is also good though a bit heavy on the religion, unsurprising given it was published in 1719.
• Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist and David Copperfield are brilliant, even if they are basically chronicles of terrible things happening to a small child, and the moral - that good breeding will show through in the end - seems a little dubious now. Highly recommend.
• Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for Sherlock Holmes, but his other books are well worth a read. I particularly liked The White Company and The Lost World.
• O.Henry's Cabbages and Kings took a little getting into, but by the end I was sorry he only wrote the one full-length book. I will definitely have to read some of his short stories though.
• There are the brother Grimm's Fairy Tales, the original versions of stories like Cinderella which you probably won't want to read to your kids. The stories are amazingly surreal, frequently violent, morally questionable, and Great. Most of the books here don't need illustrations, but in this case I recommend going for the illustrated hardback version which is also really good value.

Then there is all the classic SciFi. Jules Verne's A Journey into the Interior of the Earth was enjoyable but it required a serious suspension of disbelief (particularly near the end). It's interesting partly to see how little was known about the Earth's interior then. H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds is however a surprisingly believable account of an alien invasion, and is enjoyable even if you know the basic storyline. Short stories by H.P.Lovecraft like The Call of Cthulhu are worth reading, despite the not-so-subtle racism, as the universe he created has had a huge influence on other authors.

Time to bring this glorified book report to an end, so here's a final thought: Being able to carry around hundreds of these novels is nice, but the best feature of the Kindles is actually the built-in dictionary. Particularly when reading older books the vocabulary can be a little unusual (to say the least), and a dictionary which is quick to search is really useful. The tables have now turned on my reading habits: When I read a paper book now I quite often find myself wishing it had a dictionary.