In 1945 Inverness the Scots Gaelic word Sassenach is defined as Englishman or Outlander at worst. I suspect in the Scotland of the early 1700s, a Scot who knew both English and Scots might have considered that Englishman was the worst of those 2 possible meanings.

I mention those 2 periods as the action in Outlander starts in 1945 and quickly moves to the Scotland of the early 1700s. If you remember a bit of Scottish history, you may recall that as the time of the Bonnie Price Charlie rebellion.

I had not intended to watch this series. I had read the book as a hardback years ago when it came out and did not care for it. I had recorded Outlander on my DVR as I needed to experiment a little with the new cable box and I didn’t want to chance ruining something I wanted to watch. After doing my tests Outlander was still there.

The reviews of the series now on Starz have very favorable and so my wife and I decide to give it a chance. We watched the first in the series, enjoyed it very much, and are eager for more. So that is all we have seen so far.

I can say that the series is promising and the first episode is very good. I’ll have to withhold judgement on the series until I see more.

But meanwhile I had the book on my Kindle. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon was a free download years ago. I had not intended to read it but when I was a new Kindle owner I downloaded it just in case. Anyway I probably thought it best to practice my downloading skills with a few free books and several of them are still on the Kindle.

So since I was so impressed with the TV version, I started to read Outlander on my Kindle. At first I thought I would just cover the parts of the book in episode 1 to see how it compared to the book. I thought they did a good job. By this time I was totally enthralled with the book and kept on reading.

And that got me to thinking – why it is so different this time?. The book is obviously the same. So the change must be in me. There certainly are lots of differences. One thing for sure is that I am much older. Another is that I have travel to Scotland a few times since my first reading. But I don’t think the answer is in either if those.

I think the biggest difference are that I am now retired. When I was young and had a job and parenting to keep me busy, I could only devote limited time to reading. The Outlander is a rather long book and it probably took a fairly long time to make any progress. Now that I am retired, my leisure reading is more concentrated.

Another difference may be the Kindle experience. When I first downloaded the book, it was on an old fashioned Kindle. Now I do most of my Kindle reading on a Kindle Fire. Since Amazon keeps my downloads in the cloud as well as downloading to the device I am using, it was no problem to download another copy for free to my Kindle Fire.

Then a few days ago I had a long wait in an office which had Wi-Fi, so I download from the cloud to the Kindle app on my iPhone. The cloud kept track of where I had left off at home and I was able to make more progress in the book while waiting in the office. Then when I got home (Wi-Fi again), my Kindle Fire was able to pick up where I left off with the iPhone.

A related point is that it is much easier to hold and carry around a Kindle (or phone) than a large book.

So I am a bit over a quarter way though the book. As mentioned I’ve seen only one episode of the Starz series. But I am looking forward to more of the Outlander from both.