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.
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.
