Of the many expenses I’ve been cutting back on this year, the easiest for me was the book club, because I’ve been doing about ninety percent of any reading on my Kindle since I got it last spring. If a book isn’t available on Kindle, Amazon kindly provides me with a way to tell the publisher that I’d read it if it were. Any non-Kindle book that I’ve read this year has probably come from my extensive collection of books I already owned, many of which came from this book club.

And so far, I haven’t bought anything for my Kindle that I haven’t actually read. That’s because Amazon makes a healthy free sample available before I have to buy the whole book. About a third of the time, I get to the end of the sample and, instead of buying the rest of the book, I move on to another sample. This has been a wonderful way to wean myself from the book club syndrome, where I bought everything I thought I might want to read, and then let it sit on the shelf forever (or longer). That’s why I have shelves and shelves full of books, some read and many more unread.

But I still intend to get to all those books some day. I just have to live to be three hundred years old.

Now my plan is to see how long the book club will keep me as an active member, before they realize I’m never going to buy anything from them again. I still get the emails and the monthly catalogues, with an occasional heartfelt plea. Why haven’t we heard from you lately? How can you resist the latest offer? What if we threw in an extra book for free? Or a box of candy? Or a brand new car?

It hasn’t gone quite that far yet, but I don’t expect their patience with me to last forever. I’m waiting for the threats. I’m waiting for “or else” to appear in one of their pleas. When I see “this is your last chance,” I’ll be a little sad, because I like to go through the catalogues and read about what books are available, and then buy them on Kindle.

This isn’t another ad for Kindle. I’ve done several testimonials in the months I’ve been using it, and I never regret for a second the fact that I was, as they say, an “early adopter.” I do have a tinge of regret that they dropped the price by fifty bucks a couple of months after I adopted mine, but I knew I was paying a lot when I bought it, and (after researching the alternatives) I plunged in anyway. I use it every day, and I can honestly say (or at least guess) I’ve completed more books this year than in any year since— maybe 1971? That was the year I graduated from college.