All my life I have loved books. I was surrounded by them as a child and cannot remember a time when reading was not part of my life. As a child, my ambition was to write a book. When I was 16 I started on a science fiction novel. I wrote about 30,000 words of drivel. I think I still have the MS in my attic. I finally achieved my ambition when I was about 30.
I own lots of books. They take up an inordinate amount of space and just a few in a box make it too heavy to lift. As I am planning to move house, this is an issue that is on my mind just now. In recent years, I have got better at letting them go. Now, once I have finished reading a book, if I am quite sure that I will not refer to it again, I get rid of it - either sell it or donate it to a charity shop. But maybe a better solution is coming along ...
The demise of conventional paper books has been predicted for many years, as they are replaced by electronic books of some kind. Is that going to happen sometime soon?
Of course, we routinely refer to documents on the screen of desktop computes or laptops, but that is hardly the same thing as reading a whole book. I first tried this about 7 years ago. I was a regular user of Palm devices and got one with a larger screen and wondered what else I could do with it. I read a short novel (Nicholas Sparks, if I recall) using this device. It was easy enough, but did not become a regular habit. Why not? The simple answer is availability. This has two facets. First, the number of e-books available was very limited. Second, the device did not have the power capacity to be used for hours at a stretch.
Things are changing. I have been interested in e-book readers for a while - like the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle. But I never felt that they got cheap enough for a single function device. They both made significant advances on the availability front, with quite large libraries of material and excellent battery lives. But then along came iPad.
It is not just an e-reader - iPad is many other things as well. So it's higher price is more readily justified. Battery life is not as good as dedicated devices, but not at all bad either. Availability of material is good too. Apart from Apple's iBooks offering (which I have yet to be able to sample), the Kindle app gives easy access to Amazon's products. I am sure that others are available and more will come.
I am currently giving it a try. I have obtained some Kindle books and seeing how comfortable I am with reading on the iPad screen. I have reservations about staring at an illuminated screen just before going to sleep. Only time will tell whether this is a problem. I love the way that I can litter books with notes and bookmarks and automatically keep my place in several books at once.
I have always been a big fan of Douglas Adams, who was so creative and far sighted. Some years ago, he was the keynote speaker at a conference that I was attending. I was too busy to go to his talk, figuring that I would get to see the Great Man on another occasion. I was wrong, as he tragically died a few months later. One of his most original creations was the concept of the interactive e-book, which he called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is so sad that he did not live to see this concept embodied in iPad.
Normally I like widows. They are women of the world, often without guardians, and frequently adventurous. This one was different. She did not know she was a widow yet.
One of the classic symptoms of depression is sleep disruption, which usually means waking up early or being unable to sleep when you're exhausted.I know exactly how that feels.
Depression happens to people who won't listen to the messages that their subconscious is sending them.
When I was young I remember seeing a film about Helen Keller, who was born blind, deaf and dumb, and her teacher who brought her out into the world. At the start, the deeply introverted child didn't want to leave her familiar isolation and learn sign language. But her teacher forced her, pressing the words into her palm like money she didn't know how to spend.Beautiful!
The British love of pets is, therefore, highly misleading. It's a spiritual matter in heavy disguise. What people in the park are really doing, as they throw a ball for Tyson or Slipper, is taking their own souls for a run.
We were each given a surf-board, like a personal headstone to carry down the beach.
Prophylactic doses of boredom and depression together in the form of meditation are very helpful in building up a resistance to them in your emotional immune system.
We have explicit expectations of ourselves in specific situations - beyond expectations: they are requirements. Some of these are small: If we are given a surprise party, we will be delighted. Others are sizeable: If a parent dies, we will be grief-stricken. But perhaps in tandem with these expectations is the private fear that we will fail convention in the crunch. That we will receive the fateful phone call and our mother is dead and we feel nothing. I wonder if this quiet, unutterable little fear is even keener than the fear of the bad news itself: that we will discover ourselves to be monstrous.Her descriptive prose is very evocative:
As ever, I marveled at your appetite, recently revived; you may have been the last WASP in America who still regularly breakfasted on two eggs, bacon, sausage, and toast. I could never manage more than coffee, but I loved the sizzle of smoked pork, the fragrance of browning bread, and the general atmosphere of relish for the day ahead that this ritual fostered. The sheer vigor with which you prepared this feast must have scrubbed your arteries of its consequences.Her skill with metaphor is outstanding. Instead of using them for effect, they are always used to say something that would be harder in "straight" text, for example:
For about five minutes no one said anything, and then we gradually resumed the pretense of an ordinary morning, making no mention of Kevin's outburst the way polite people are meant to pretend they didn't notice the release of a load fart. Still the smell lingered, if less of gas than of cordite.This book has the key elements that make me enjoy reading: it has a beginning, middle and end; the characters are well drawn; the pace is just right and keeps me turning the pages; there is a very unexpected twist at the end that really makes you draw breath.
