A Kindle I’d just gotten in June withered and froze over the weekend, and by Wednesday Amazon had already gotten me its replacement. That was the quick part. The laborious part is “transferring your library,” as the Kindle calls it; redownloading your purchases from your permanent library in the ether to the new device, so you can access your fave titles when your WiFi isn’t on.

When I moved to my current home 11 years ago, from an apartment around the corner where I’d lived for the previous 12 years, “transferring my library” meant sorting through some 6,000 books and magazines, carting hundreds of boxes to the new place and distributing the rest to friends, Never Ending Books and elsewhere. The process took about six months, and I loved every minute of it.

Same with the Kindle. Shifting stuff from the amorphous archives to the plastic machine is virtually immediate. Sorting, howeverm, takes time. I found I could move my “collection” headings from my previous Kindle but not their contents. Stayed up late in bed reconstituting collections and creating new ones.

I think I enjoy organizing and ordering things on my Kindle even more than I enjoy reading on it.

Herewith, my “Kindle Collections”:
• Comics (Kindle anthologies of Krazy Kat, Out Our Way and Barney Google, plus newer strips such as The Norm)
• Old British Magazines (Blackwood’s, The Tatler, Punch)
• Scripts (lots of Elizabethans at the moment, but also PDFs of things upcoming at Long Wharf and the Yale Rep)
• Children’s book (Obama’s book for this daughters, the complete Wizard of Oz canon, many others)
• Latin (vulgate bible, some grammar, some humor, Apuleis’ Golden Asse…)
• Poetry
• Twain (the autobiography, the complete works, various tacky sequels to Huck Finn by other writers)
• Westerns (Zane Grey mostly, but also Bret Harte)
• About Theater (autobios, histories, mystery novels with theater themes)
• Boswell (by which I mean Johnson)
• Kindle (various guides on how to use the thing, or publish to it. All hail Stephen Windwalker!)
• Silent Movies (memoirs by Chaplin and Fairbanks; William Thomas Sherman’s vast Mabel Normand Source Book)
• Mythic (Bullfinch, Aesop, Atlantis)
• Jazz Age (Fitzgerald, duh, but also Don Marquis, Ben Hecht, Ring Lardner, Franklin Adams..)
• Swingin’ ‘60s (Terry Southern, a couple of tributes to Peter Cook, the Man from O.R.G.Y. spy parodies, garage-band histories and more Cold War coolths.)
• Dunwich (as in horror: Lovecraft, Gaimin, Konrath, and Lydia Dare’s perfectly titled horror romance Certain Wolfish Charm)
• Gumshoes and Loafers (detective fiction, from Max Allan Collins’ Nate Heller to John Buchan’s Richard Hannay. Leslie Charteris’ original Saint books are strangely still not on Kindle, but Burt Barer’s Capture the Saint is.)
• A Thousand Eyes (mid-20th century paranoid suspense pulp fiction by the masters: Cornell Woolrich, Fredric Brown, Philip K. Dick).
• News Media (Game Change, but also Charles Dudley Warner’s American Newspaper and Hillaire Belloc’s The Free Press).
• Contemporary Comedy (Gideon Defoe’s Pirates! Books, Gilbert Gottfried’s memoirs)
• Yellow Bookish (Wilde, Beerbohm, Huysman)
• Hawthorne (love the Tanglewood Tales and Wonder Tales!)
• Outdoor Adventure (Five Tarzan novels and a guide to the British agricultural soap opera The Archers)
• New Novels (still haven’t finished Franzen’s Freedom)
• Dictionaries
I also subscribe to my own blogs—this one and New Haven Theater Jerk—on Kindle. It’s usually the only place where I catch typos in them. It’s a focused and reading experience… assuming that one can stop sorting in order to read.