There are two types of people in the world:

• Those who like to sneak a peek at the last page of a novel &
• Those who don’t

I fall very firmly & unapologetically into the first category…and yet I am not the type who sneaks a look at Xmas presents.

This habit has become even clearer since I started using the Kindle/ebook reader my husband bought me for Xmas.

Don’t get me wrong- I love love love it. Given that I have so far read 4 novels over the last week & a half on this Brisbane trip, I figure it has saved me at least 2-3 kgs of packing weight, packed space & money for when I realised after the 1^st two novels that I hadn’t brought enough with me to get through until the end of this crappy project.

With the kindle I love how I can dip in & out of different books. I love having a portable bookcase in my handbag rather than trying to predict what I might feel like reading after an exceptionally hard day in a long line of exceptionally hard days at the office. I have always found that deciding which books to pack is a little like deciding what you will possibly feel like eating for lunch next Wednesday.

At home I generally have a few different books going at the same time. There is usually:

• Something light & frothy for reading in the bath or the pool
• Something a little more meaty for sitting on the lounge with a wine & my dog at the end of a bad day
• Something I know I should be reading because it is supposed to be literary & declared “good” by some reading club or another but that I haven’t actually decided that I like yet
• Some 700+ page epic which I have got halfway through & can’t see the end to
• A chick lit novel or two that I am reading for escapism &, if I am perfectly honest, genre analysis
• A lightish mystery or thriller in a favourite series

With the kindle, it is all in together. In my handbag. Cool. I can even highlight passages I like.

What don’t I like about it?

It doesn’t feel like or smell like a book. Because mine has a really cool red leather (in homage to my Venus in Aries) cover it does actually read like a book.

Of more importance to me is that it doesn’t have a page count & I can’t flip to the end. For me, both of these points are important.

With nearly every planet & major chart point in my natal chart hitting Uranus or Pluto and therefore high scores in Donna Cunningham’s Uranus (51) & Pluto (59) tests, I am commitment phobic & a control freak. There I said it.

I like to know just how much of myself I will be committing to a book. If it is anything longer than, say, 375 pages, I had better be pretty damn sure that it is worth my time. But more than controlling, I like to know these things from an efficiency perspective.

My daughter (Five Foot Nothing), with all of her Aries planets, is what can be termed an efficient reader. She doesn’t want to have to go wading through words for characterisation or motivations. The author is wasting her time if she is expecting FFN to go delving below the surface. She recently declared that she wasn’t going to finish Eclipse because “like the book is going to take me 6 months to read & the movie is only like 2 hours so I really don’t think this is a very good use of my time.”

For all that I love to read- it satisfies the Piscean need to escape- I am efficient in a different way. I blame my Venus in Aries- I don’t want to have to wait for satisfaction, & if by chance I do commit to the long haul, it better bloody well be worth it at the end. I do not want to get to the end of an epic only to find that any of the following has happened:

• The bitch gets the guy
• The bad karma fairy visits the wrong person
• Something bad happens to a kid or to someone who is good- I can forgive JK Rowling most things, but not for killing off Dobbie
• The dog dies

Imagine my disappointment if I invest the time & commit to a book only to get to page 395 to find that nothing is resolved (to my satisfaction), the bitch got the guy & the dog hasn’t made it. Now that would neither be a return on investment or an efficient use of my time.