The books and I

I’ve spent one of the best weekends here in Austin. I’m on my 9th week here and so far I’ve been having a good time. Except that I miss my books and reading so much. I know I can’t buy too many paperbacks and hard covers while I’m here because it would be expensive to ship them back home when it’s time to leave.

I have flirted with the idea of buying Kindle Paperwhite. It’s about $119 and based on the reviews, it’s the best e-book reader yet. But my friends persuaded me to get a tablet instead. And when we were at Best Buy, I saw SamSung’s Galaxy Tab 8.4 and I liked it! But it was a little over the budget at $400. Luckily, I only transferred $300 from my savings to my checkings account. It was  supposed to be enough for the Kindle and a week of grocery or any other expenses. I went home empty handed and decided to think about the purchase.

I spent the first half of my Saturday searching for the best device to satisfy my hunger for reading. I considered Kata T3 because it was cheap and seemed to have good specs. But I’ve read some people saying that the after sales were bad so I decided against it. If I was in the Philippines it could have been easier to get an exchange from an Owtel shop if ever I got a defective device (just like my i1) but since I’m in the United States, it’s wiser to get a device from a known company.

By lunch time, I decided to go for Google’s Nexus 7 ($239 +19.72 tax = $258.72) and ordered it from Amazon. It had good reviews and seemed like a good deal. It will be arriving on Tuesday!!! Yey! But I still can’t wait to get my hands on a book. I desperately want to read one already. Luckily, it’s already the beginning of Spring here and the weather was perfect. I decided to walk to Target. It was actually my first time to go there and I was amazed that it was only about a 10-min walk from my apartment. Perfect!!!

When I was already in Target, it took me a long time to choose the book to bring home. There was just too many that I want! But I decided to settle with “Until the End of Time” by one of my favorite authors, Danielle Steel. Her novels always moved me and brought me to tears. I loved it! 🙂

Oh, if only I could just read for a living… I share the same fantasy with Bo Sanchez.. to work as a guard of a lighthouse in an island accompanied by a gazillion books. And there would be food delivered to me… all I’d do is to read books from sunrise to sunset… hehe