There are two kinds of cheap Kindle books:  serendipitous Kindle daily deal finds, either $1.99 or $2.99, and books that I’m actually looking for that turn out to be cheap, usually $4 or less.

In the post about new (to me) authors, I wrote about some of the Kindle daily deal books I’ve read, not surprising since the daily deals are a good chance to try new authors at a low cost.  Orphan Train, a novel by Christina Baker Kline, was an especially exciting find.  I bought the book because I was interested in the subject:  the orphans sent to the Midwest from New York City by the Children’s Aid Society from the mid 19th century through the 1920s. Theodore Roosevelt senior was one of the founders of the Society, one of his many philanthropic ventures described in Mornings on Horseback.  I had found the brief mention of the Society’s practice of shipping orphans out of New York intriguing, and this new novel seemed like it would have more information.  Not long after I forked over my $1.99 for the book, a book club member mentioned that she had read it and liked it, and I saw that it was on the NYT bestseller list: promising indicators that the book would be a good interesting read as well as a good buy.  I started reading, and the two story lines of the Irish immigrant orphan in 1929 and the modern day foster child in Maine were immediately gripping.  I loved this book because the writing about the orphan train children’s experiences is dead-on realistic about their vulnerability and the hardships and dangers they faced, but it isn’t degrading and gruesome like some of these books can be.  The author doesn’t tell you about the emotional price her characters had to pay to survive, she lets the characters show you.  Descriptions and reviews of Christina Baker Kline’s other books look promising and I want to read more of her work.

Kindle daily deals can also be a source of guilty pleasure and/or nostalgic rereading in a low-cost impulse-buy sort of way.  I bought Five Little Pigs, by Agatha Christie, for $1.99 and read it immediately.  I knew it would be a surefire fun quick read.  This one has Hercule Poirot investigating an old murder at the request of the young woman whose mother was convicted of the murder and had died in prison.  It had been a long time since I read this book, and I couldn’t quite remember who the murderer was and how it had been done, which made it more fun.  Christie wrote several books on the theme of looking for the true perpetrator of an old crime, all solid Christie quality work, but this is one of the better ones.  I consider all my Christie books keepers, and the best thing about the Kindle versions is that I don’t have to find room for them in my crowded bookcases.

Another nostalgic favorite that turned up as a Kindle deal is Up the Down Staircase, by Bel Kaufman.  I read this book about a teacher’s challenges and triumphs dealing with students and educational bureaucracy when I was in high school, and reread it a couple of times later.  I hadn’t seen or thought of it in a while, but welcomed this old friend into my Kindle stash.  I made the mistake of reading the introduction by Bel Kaufman, which turned out to be incredibly long and repetitive.  This is the problem with Kindle reading; you can’t tell how long and drawn out something is going to be.  By the time I got to the actual book, the glow of anticipation had faded somewhat, and I didn’t get the in-your-face experience of realizing that nothing in bull-headed wasteful education administration or undisciplined students has changed for the better, just gotten much worse.  Ms. Kaufman had already made this point repeatedly in her introduction.  Also, the great charm of the book was in the format of reproducing memos, notes, tests and other documents on the pages of the book.  The impact of this (at the time) innovative book design is much less in the eBook version.  I haven’t gotten very far into this book, but will probably dip into it again from time to time.

I scored a great cheap book coup when I looked on Amazon for World War Z, by Max Brooks.  The Kindle version was $2.49, and I could buy it and start reading it immediately; great, because I was eager to read the book after seeing Brad Pitt’s movie World War Z.  This has got to be one of the strangest book to movie adaptations ever: the book and movie had exactly ONE character in common, the Israeli government official who was the driving force behind a plan to quarantine part of Israel from the zombie infection.  The book is a series of interviews from a UN investigation report done after the zombie war, and the movie follows a UN investigator who travels to various locations trying to work out a way to stop the infection from spreading.  Nice to see the UN getting some positive recognition, and that Max Brooks and Brad Pitt seem to think that the organization is tough enough to survive zombie hordes.  A fast, engaging, cleverly constructed read.

I read an article about three lawyers who are successful authors of legal thrillers.  I was very familiar with Scott Turow and John Grisham, but had never read anything by the third, Lisa Scottoline.  I checked Amazon to get an idea of what she has written, and found that most of the Kindle editions of the early books in her Rosato and Associates legal series were available at very reasonable prices.  I managed to figure out that Everywhere that Mary Went was the first book in the series (this usually takes some doing) and bought it for $3.79.  I liked the lead character Mary DiNunzio and the details about her work as a trial lawyer.  The mystery plot about the supposedly accidental deaths of two people close to Mary, and her grief and determination to find out what happened, was well-written and engaging and I look forward to reading more in this series.  Lisa Scottoline seems to be a very prolific writer, with a lot of books in the Rosato and Associates series and several stand-alone books.  Such a popular writer should be well-represented at the library, and free books are even better than cheap books.