New Toy?

Ours is an old-fashioned house. During mine and my fiancee's wedding planning process, my future father-in-law has commented upon this fact several times. I asked her family's permission, our gender roles are slightly archaic, and our decorations as well as the general theme and tone have consistently sided with tradition over modernism.

And ours is a house that likes to read.

You would truly be amazed to see the range of literature on our bookshelf: from James Joyce to Jude Deveraux, Margaret Mitchell to Michael Crichton - we've got it all, and we want more. It is a requirement that we have a reading room in our house.

Making the leap from hardcover to e-book, then, was not the easiest thing for us to do, but the sheer convenience of carrying such tomes as Don Quixote, War and Peace, and Thus Spake Zarathustra in a single half-pound unit was just too much for even us to pass up. So we got a Kindle.

And now our e-reader family may be expanding.

For some time now my fiancee has been thinking of getting a laptop - or at least something more portable than her cinema-sized iMac; likewise, I've been considering a tablet - or at least something I could easily take to and from school for recreational use.

Enter the Kindle Fire, perhaps the perfect compromise. It's inexpensive and has the bulk of features we're looking for. Maybe not as powerful or extensive as an iPad, certainly not as capable as a laptop, but we're truly looking for something novel (pardon the pun): convenient, easy to use, and fairly minimal in scope. Neither of us is looking to really compute away from home - mostly we just want something to keep us amused and somewhat connected when we're out and about.

I'm not saying we're definitely getting it, but it's definitely something the White household is keeping tabs on. Actually looking forward to product reviews!