Friday, September 20, 2013

Great Literature is Wasted on the Young, or Why My Kindle Is Amusing Me But Not My Cats

The Kindle reader I suddenly found in my life has proved to be better than I expected, to wit:  though the cats both try to sit on it and put their paws right where I'm reading, in true feline style, they can no longer stop me from turning pages, yay.

Then, if a book is huge, it still weighs the same on the reader.

And finally, best of all: I've downloaded classics from Gutenberg Project, may they live forever, and find that on revisiting Vanity Fair it's much much funnier than I thought.  I had to read it as a teen, and slogged through it, missing most of the irony and deliberate two dimensionality of the actors in it, and now find it's Austen with cap and bells, and I keep having to stop to laugh.  And I can enlarge the print -- classics in print often have distressingly tiny fonts.

I know Trollope is very good, having reread some of it as an adult, so maybe I'll download ole Anthony soon.  I have the complete Gutenberg Austen, though I have reread her many times, until my book fell apart.  This is another reader plus: your book won't wear out!

Just sayin'

But it does cut into my DVD watching.  And cooking.  And other obligations in life, which I have to scramble to catch up with. Tomorrow is the Festival of the Arts, which I'll cover in Art the Beautiful, but meanwhile I have to make sure all my stuff for the various commitments is organized and processed and generally ready.  

Plarn for the giant loom, other interesting materials same destination, art ready to display on the clothesline show, embroidery to show at the guild table area, camera loaded and battery charged for pix of all the above.  Good  thing I live pretty close to the Festival site, since last year I had to nip home to get another memory card when the one in the camera filled up faster than expected.  This year I'm ready.

I am, I am.

5 comments:

  1. I'm into book two of Trollope's Barchester Chronicles (a lovely little Everyman's edition of around 1929 I picked up years ago in a second hand bookstore in Halifax!), but it's the only one I own, and you've just given me the idea of going into Gutenberg and getting all six of the chronicles. They are so funny!!

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  2. There's a big kerfluffle here about the sudden influx of bedbugs getting into library books - really scary. Sure makes me start to second-think the advisability of one of those new-fangled electronic wonders.

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  3. Glad that you are rediscovery the joys of the classics! :)

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  4. I'm so glad you are enjoying the Kindle ... I have been really pleased with how much it has contributed to me reading more.

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