Just finished reading George Martin’s Game of Thrones. A truly great read. I enjoyed this book more than anything I have read in recent memory. Someday soon, I may write a fuller review. Not now.

For now, I’m just struck by how much fun it is to read. For the past year or so, I’ve been reading fairly serious stuff and thinking a lot about the mechanics of reading on an eReader. I have extolled the virtues of reading on the iPad and I stand by those comments. But reading on the dedicated Kindle reader is more fulfilling in some ways.

Reading on the iPad has a bit of artificiality to it. The iPad is great for my technical and professional reading. I can cover much more ground and gather news from a variety of sources. But the reading I do on the iPad is primarily for information, for learning, discovering and understanding. My iPad keeps me well-informed.

Somehow in all of this, I had forgotten how healthful it is for me to read for escape, to immerse myself in the details of a time/place that does not exist. I love print books because they are single-function devices. A good fiction book is an escape pod. You get in, pull the cord and go where it takes you. You don’t strictly get to decide where you are going. You are just going somewhere that isn’t here.

But, let’s be honest, print books are sometimes a bit of a drag. You’ve got to carry them around, keep up with them, remember to stick them in your work bag for lunch break, and you never seem to have them handy when you find yourself with an unexpected 15 minutes to read.

The Kindle, like a print book, is a totem. It is a magical object that does that same one thing. Except I can carry it everywhere because I can read on my eReader, my iPad app and my iPhone. Being able to pick up the story when and where I want is a liberating experience. It makes reading fun again.

Having written all this, I’m not sure if this post is about the Kindle making reading fun or simple my own rediscovery that fiction is fun and helpful to my overall well-being.

Either way, I love to read. Reading is fun again. I am grateful, at least in part, to Kindle for helping me rediscover that.