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Of Reading...

4/6/2012

1 Comment

 
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Reading is a pastime I've always enjoyed and, I hope, managed to share with my children.  Not simply a means of learning, it is an enjoyable way of escaping some of the vicissitudes of life.  I rarely have but one book going at a time and flit between one or the other as my mood dictates.

I used to have quite an extensive and eclectic library but am now reduced to a few well worn favorites and the occasional new additions garnered from swaps and donations.  Oh, and there's the Kindle.

The Kindle library is growing what with the wealth of free books available online.  I'm enjoying old favorites such as the sublimely disturbing H.P. Lovecraft collection and an occasional newly-published tome (most recently "Why Nation's Fail"...but don't waste your time or money on that one!).  Electronics and the internet have ushered in an extraordinary ability to read old and new alike no matter where you may find yourself.  Load up your computer before leaving for the jungle and you can read Edgar Rice Burroughs or Edgar Allen Poe in your tent while the monkeys are howling in the trees overhead.  Now that will tickle all your senses.

Paperbacks are nice too.  A handy size and often easier on the purse.  During a period of my life when I often traveled by air, I would stop at the bookstore and purchase one or more for the trip.  As a rather fast reader I more often bought by weight than by subject, so that once fully involved in the plot, was not prematurely stopped by a lack of pages.  

But those paperbacks and, especially, electronic books fail in a very important way.  

Friends, divesting themselves of some little used assets, gave me several books, amongst them Dante's Inferno and Moby Dick.  They are proper books, hard bound with frontispieces, and real paper pages...  There is a feel and a smell to these books that my computer can't replicate. With each page that is turned a whiff of binder's glue, ink, and old paper emanates reminding me of the many long hours of my youth spent in wood-paneled libraries surrounded by the efforts of writers, editors, publishers, and printers.  If there's anything I can say I miss, it's those days and evenings with, what seemed at the time, the word's entire knowledge in rows upon rows of proper books.

1 Comment
Rick O'Donnell
6/6/2012 05:22:32

Books...yes. I imagine that without literature and music (another indispensable) life would be depressingly bleak. Here, the day after Ray Bradbury passed, I have just finished revisiting a Robert Heinlein classic, Stranger in a Strange Land. This was the "complete" unabridged hardback edition.Still fascinating!
I have to agree with you that nothing quite satisfies the tactile senses like a real live hard cover book. The e-reader that the kids bought me a while back, though I have used it some, mostly collects dust on the shelf. Try the guilty pleasure of dog-earing a page to mark your place on one! Can't be done.
I think it's time to re-read some more of Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, and maybe even some Frank Herbert of old...

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