I found a second limitation to my beloved Kindles: Trying to read anthologies.

Four years ago, I wrote about the difficulty of reading historical non-fiction on a Kindle. With printed books, I keep a bookmark or a finger tucked into the page where the relevant map resides, so I can read, “The Union forces charged …!” and then see the map of the route upon which they charged.

I can’t do that on a Kindle.

Sure, I can bookmark the map page. But the several-step process of using the bookmark interrupts the flow of the story. With a printed book, the flip back and forth takes nanoseconds.

I still love my two e-readers. Kindles have magical powers.

But anthologies present problems.

A decade or so ago, I started to reread classics in literature and biography that I had originally “read” (via post-midnight skimming or Cliff Notes) while in high school or college. Back then, I too often gleaned just enough to pass the upcoming test. I missed the abundant reasons why those long-ago teachers insisted that we callow youths read these books: They resonate. Now, I have the time to savor the style as well as digest the story lines.

In American literature, nobody resonates with the variety, the depth, the force, the passion or the humor of Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain.

Instead of downloading a single Twain work onto my Kindle, I splurged on a “complete Mark Twain” anthology.

I rediscovered the throbbing aquatic themes of “Life on the Mississippi,” and I laughed out loud at Twain’s sometimes-ribald self-deprecating humor in “Roughing It.”

But I also delight in Twain’s letters and short essays.

When I tried to skip and sample via the Kindle, it required many computerized steps to get to “Go To,” Then “Contents,” then “Letters,” then a listing of those letters.

So I went old school. I bought a two-volume set that had been hibernating in Authors Bookstore in Warren for just $20. Money well spent.

The old-school finger-bookmark saves a lot of time. I can sample Twain’s gentle guidance to younger family members, his acerbic outrage at the slipshod service of the gas company, then wander among a buffet of new-to-me epistles, noshing and grazing as the subjects and the prose move me to do.

I have two e-reader devices. One is the standard Kindle, bought from Amazon about five years back. The other is a Kindle application loaded onto an Android operating system tablet bought as a bundle with my cell phone. The tablet is more versatile. Most of the time, I take it with me when portability is desirable. But when it came to taking a reader along during this past deer season, the basic Kindle won hands-down. It is lighter, simpler and, if I crunch it as I did its predecessor (I sat on that one), the replacement cost is low.

Both e-readers seem to have the same magical power when I fire up the Kindle application.

At the hospital laboratory for blood work, at the doctor’s office for quarterly checkups, at any destination where waiting in a queue is part of the routine, I have found that if I bring my Kindle, I get right in and right out.

If I forget it, I sit, I wait, I watch “Ellen” or similar drivel, or scan dozens of magazines whose topics leave me tepid. After a wait approaching an hour, I finally get in to get the blood drawn, get the doctor visit, etc.

But with a Kindle … Magic!

I barely get the tablet booted up, the Kindle application selected, and my mind readjusted to resume reading at the page where I had stopped when I hear those supernatural words: “Mr. Bonavita, you may come in now!”

Delight.

I do not know how the Kindles do it, but they do it.

If I bring a printed book along, I wait, and wait as long as I would if I had arrived empty-handed.

But with the Kindle, I rarely even get the seat fully warmed before I am called in to the main office, the laboratory, the meeting.

Oddly, the more interesting the Kindle book is to me, the shorter the wait becomes. If I open “Huck Finn,” I barely get a sentence past my eyeballs. If I open something by Dostoyevsky … Egad! Why would I open something by Dostoyevsky again?

As mentioned earlier, to take full advantage of the Kindle’s magic, one should choose with care the books to be opened while waiting in line. Map-linked books and anthologies? Naah. A good biography or a gripping novel? Sure. A single work of Twain? Always.

When in a queue, skip the map-based books or the collected anthologies. Take a Kindle. Dive into a novel. Watch the wait-in-line time shrink.

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Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.