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There are more than one million e-books available in the Amazon Kindle Bookstore, an embarrassment of riches making it harder and harder to find good books - books that are worth all the hours you will spend reading them. What to do? Read book reviews. Request free samples. And, of course, (shameless plug) read The Kindle Reader.

But consider serendipity - the happy accident that happens now and then when you search for one book in the Amazon bookstore and (surprise!) the search leads you to another that you really enjoy reading. To create such a happy event, may I suggest a game of Kindle Roulette?

The game is simple. Think of an interesting and perhaps unusual word or phrase and search for it in the Kindle Bookstore. See how many books you find and pick out a few titles to research. I got started doing this after reading a Winston Churchill quotation about pigs. It reminded me of my youthful fondness for pigs and the small pig statue collection I had years ago. Churchill wrote: "I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."

A search for "pigs" brings up 845 results in the Amazon Kindle bookstore - including a bunch that will appeal to the recreational reader. Try Kindle Roulette. You may discover some real treasures.

The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood, by Sy Montgomery. Ballantine Books, 2006. Print Length: 272 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (76 reviews). Kindle edition $11.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"A naturalist who spent months at a time living on her own among wild creatures in remote jungles, Sy Montgomery had always felt more comfortable with animals than with people. So she gladly opened her heart to a sick piglet who had been crowded away from nourishing meals by his stronger siblings. Yet Sy had no inkling that this piglet, later named Christopher Hogwood, would not only survive but flourish - and she soon found herself engaged with her small-town community in ways she had never dreamed possible. The Good Good Pig celebrates Christopher Hogwood in all his glory, from his inauspicious infancy to hog heaven in rural New Hampshire, where his boundless zest for life and his large, loving heart made him absolute monarch over a (mostly) peaceable kingdom. At first, his domain included only Sy’s cosseted hens and her beautiful border collie, Tess. Then the neighbors began fetching Christopher home from his unauthorized jaunts, the little girls next door started giving him warm, soapy baths, and the villagers brought him delicious leftovers. His intelligence and fame increased along with his girth. He was featured in USA Today and on several National Public Radio environmental programs. On election day, some voters even wrote in Christopher’s name on their ballots. Sy reveals what she and others learned from this generous soul..." - Publisher.

A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig & Other Essays, by Charles Lamb. Penguin, 2011. Print Length: 96 p. Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $6.19. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"A rapturous appreciation of pork crackling, a touching description of hungry London chimney sweeps, a discussion of the strange pleasure of eating pineapple and a meditation on the delights of Christmas feasting are just some of the subjects of these personal, playful writings from early nineteenth-century essayist Charles Lamb. Exploring the joys of food and also our complicated social relationship with it, these essays are by turns sensuous, mischievous, lyrical and self-mocking. Filled with a sense of hunger, they are some of the most fascinating and nuanced works ever written about eating, drinking and appetite. Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was an English essayist best known for his humorous Essays of Elia from which the essay 'A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig' is taken." - Publisher.

The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment, by A. J. Jacobs. Simon & Schuster, 2009. Print Length: 256 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (66 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"Bestselling author and human guinea pig A. J. Jacobs puts his life to the test and reports on the surprising and entertaining results. He goes undercover as a woman, lives by George Washington’s moral code, and impersonates a movie star. He practices 'radical honesty,' brushes his teeth with the world’s most rational toothpaste, and outsources every part of his life to India - including reading bedtime stories to his kids. And in a new adventure, Jacobs undergoes scientific testing to determine how he can put his wife through these and other life-altering experiments - one of which involves public nudity." - Publisher.

Five Little Pigs, by Agatha Christie. Harper Collins, 2004. Print Length: 240 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (19 reviews). Kindle edition $6.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

A classic mystery originally published in 1942 and featuring Christie's inimitable detective Hercule Poirot. "Beautiful Caroline Crale was convicted of poisoning her husband, yet there were five other suspects: Philip Blake (the stockbroker) who went to market; Meredith Blake (the amateur herbalist) who stayed at home; Elsa Greer (the three-time divorcee) who had roast beef; Cecilia Williams (the devoted governess) who had none; and Angela Warren (the disfigured sister) who cried 'wee wee wee' all the way home. It is sixteen years later, but Hercule Poirot just can't get that nursery rhyme out of his mind..." - Publisher.

Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver. Harper Collins, 2009. Print Length: 372 p. Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (193 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled. This is a sequel to Kingsolvers' The Bean Trees.

"Taylor Greer and her adopted Cherokee daughter Turtle, first met in The Bean Trees , will captivate readers anew in Kingsolver's assured and eloquent sequel, which mixes wit, wisdom and the expert skills of a born raconteur into a powerfully affecting narrative. Now six years old and still bearing psychological marks of the abuse that occured before she was rescued by Taylor, Turtle is discovered by formidable Indian lawyer Annawake Fourkiller, who insists that the child be returned to the Cherokee Nation. Taylor reacts by fleeing her Tucson home with Turtle to begin a precarious existence on the road...Kingsolver's intelligent consideration of issues of family and culture - both in her evocation of Native American society and in her depiction of the plight of a single mother - brims with insight and empathy." - Publishers Weekly.

Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds, by Darren Oldridge. T & F Books, 2007. Print Length: 210 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (8 reviews). Kindle edition $14.55 (or rent for $8.02). Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Strange Histories presents a serious account of some of the most extraordinary occurrences of European and North American history and explains how they made sense to people living at the time. From grisly anecdotes about ghosts, to stories of witches and werewolves, the book uses case studies from the Middle Ages and the early modern period and provides fascinating insights into the world-view of a vanished age. It shows how such occurences fitted in quite naturally with the 'common sense' of the time and offers explanations of these riveting and ultimately rational phenomena. What made reasonable, educated men and women behave in ways that seem utterly nonsensical to us today? This question and many more are answered in the fascinating book." - Publisher.

The Silver Pigs: A Marcus Didius Falco Mystery, by Lindsey Davis. Minotaur Books, 2006. Print Length: 352 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (2 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"When Marcus Didius Falco, a Roman 'informer' who has a nose for trouble that's sharper than most, encounters Sosia Camillina in the Forum, he senses immediately all is not right with the pretty girl. She confesses to him that she is fleeing for her life, and Falco makes the rash decision to rescue her - a decision he will come to regret. For Sosia bears a heavy burden: as heavy as a pile of stolen Imperial ingots, in fact. Matters just get more complicated when Falco meets Helena Justina, a Senator's daughter who is connected to the very same traitors he has sworn to expose. Soon Falco finds himself swept from the perilous back alleys of Ancient Rome to the silver mines of distant Britain - and up against a cabal of traitors with blood on their hands and no compunction whatsoever to do away with a snooping plebe like Falco..." - Publisher.
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Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.


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