5 famous books that are genuinely better to read on a Kindle

One of the most interesting features on the Kindle is the X-Ray feature, which allows you to access pre-loaded files with relevant information provided by the publisher or author. The files could include things like lists of the major and minor characters, important locations, themes, and more.

Basically, X-Ray files can help orient you if you ever get confused. That makes them useful for long, dense book series in the fantasy or sci-fi genres. For instance, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books — adapted for HBO as Game of Thrones — are famous for their enormous numbers of characters, many of whom are related to each other in arcane ways. It can be frustrating to read about a character or a placename and not quite be able to remember who or what that is. With Kindle’s X-Ray feature, you won’t get confused.

Be forewarned: the X-Ray files are only available on official Kindle editions of books purchased directly from the Amazon Kindle Store. So if you read non-Amazon ebook files on your Kindle, this feature won’t be available. Or if you love a lore-heavy fantasy series but don’t have the patience to read about it, there are plenty of TV shows that can scratch that itch for you.

“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection… the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity…”

That is an excerpt from James Joyce’s famous 1922 novel Ulysses, about the lives of three Dubliners whose daily lives are rendered epic by Joyce’s rapturously experimental prose. Another way to say that is that Joyce uses a lot of big words. What does “tellurian” mean? “Terribility”? “Propinquity”?

If you read Ulysses on Kindle, you won’t have to wonder, because it has a built-in dictionary lookup feature. It might take you a while to get through the book if you look up every word you don’t know, but it’s faster than reaching for the dictionary. And obviously you can use this feature for any book where the author feels the need to shower the reader with SAT words.

The Power Broker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Robert Moses, an urban planner who exerted huge amounts of influence over New York City in the mid-20th century despite never being elected to public office. Considered one of the best biographies of the 20th century, The Power Broker is a fascinating study of political power.

It’s also an exhaustively researched book that makes plentiful references to public figures, places, and events that were important throughout the first half of the 20th century. You might not be familiar with all of them at a glance, but thanks to Kindle’s Wikipedia lookup feature — which allows people to instantly consult relevant Wikipedia articles for whatever they’re reading — you can easily catch yourself up to speed.

This feature is fantastic for non-fiction books in general. Kindle is just one of many devices that make use of Wikipedia’s vast stores of information.

Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel about a movie, called Infinite Jest, that is so compelling that anyone who sees it loses interest in doing anything except watching it over and over until they die. It weaves together several different plot threads, is considered one of the best English-language novels published in the 20th century, and has hundreds of endnotes.

With a paper copy, you’d be flipping back and forth constantly to get all the information. But on a Kindle, you can simply click on one of the numbers or symbols next to a sentence, and the footnote will appear on your screen for you to read or close out as you please.

Released as an ebook in 2008, Marienbad My Love is the longest novel written in the English language. Nominally, it’s about a journalist-turned-filmmaker obsessed with the idea of making a sci-fi-themed remake of the 1961 French film Last Year at Marienbad, which he goes about while trying to reconnect with a married woman from his past. Along the way, he grapples with themes of technology, religion, and memory. The book incorporates voluminous samplings from other texts, including Wikipedia talk pages and internet forums.

The reason you’d want to read Marienbad My Love on a Kindle is easy: because at over 17.8 million works, it’s way too long to read any other way. A physical book version would take up your entire bookshelf.

And the suggestion here isn’t that you might actually want to read Marienbad My Love; if you do, get ready for a commitment. But this stands in for any incredibly long book that it might be inconvenient to have to lug around in physical form. If you simply don’t have room in your life for a hardcover of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, or The Stand by Stephen King, or any other book so voluminous you could sprain your back trying to lift it, consider a Kindle version instead.

And if you really would like to read a digestible version of Marienbad My Love, Mark Leach released a physical version called Marienbad My Love With Mango Extracts, where 98% of the original text is stripped out.