One of the reasons I read fewer books in April may have been the fact that I spent a fair amount of my reading time on samples of books. I meant to talk about some of these in my April reading post but did not since I was desperately trying to finish it before our Internet connection died yet again. And since I have added nothing to the leaning pile this week and am still struggling with the review I’m writing, I figured I may as well write it now.

Toward the beginning of April, I got an iPad so I’ve downloaded quite a few free samples to read from both iBooks and the Kindle app. Sometimes it can be hard to tell if I’m interested in a book from the amount of text provided since it can take a while to get into a book. But there were some I found sucked me in right away.

One that I would love to finish is Karin Lowachee’s Warchild. Although I thought the latest book by her, The Gaslight Dogs, was somewhat good but not something I was crazy about, I still wanted to try the first book in her science fiction trilogy since those are the books by her I’ve always heard about. Warchild got me hooked immediately and seemed very well-written – when I get around to trying to read a full e-book, this will most likely be my first e-book purchase. It was easily the sample I read that impressed me the most.

Other samples that made me want to read the rest:

Heart’s Blood by Juliet Marillier
Summers at Castle Auburn by Sharon Shinn
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
Storm Front by Jim Butcher

I also read samples of Embers by Laura Bickle, Darkborn by Alison Sinclair and Rampant by Diana Peterfreund. There may be a few more that I’m forgetting about.

Do you ever read book samples? Have you read any of these books and if so do you think the beginning is indicative of the entire book? Or did some of these take longer to get really good?