Summer Reading

If you've followed this blog at the Workpad site, you will have read that I am currently enmeshed in a mad, mad love affair with a new gadget of mine, a miraculous device called the Victor Reader Stream. Previously, I had borrowed exhausted cassette tapes from the Washington State Talking Book and Braille Library. Except for the cassette failures and frequent malfunction of the 1970's tape machines, it was an adequate way to keep abreast of one's reading if you didn't happen to know Braille. But in the end, all those breakdowns and tape failures wore on me and I gave up on books for a few years.

Then I acquired a Victor Reader Stream. This device enables you to download books in digital format and read them at various speeds and volumes, and depending upon the size of the SD card you eploy and the size of the books you read, you can store four or five dozen books. It's a portable Alexandria, and in fact, I have labeled my SD card "Alexandria" in honor of this fact.

This device has saved me hours of time wasting with online multiplayer games. I have read WAR AND PEACE, THE DIVINE COMEDY of Dante and now THE SILMARILLION, Tolkien's mythological basis for THE LORD OF THE RINGS. It's simply an astonishing bit of technology, and once you master the telephone keypad it's practically witless to operate. Besides some newer fantasy titles, including Suzanne Clarke's JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL, my wee Alexandria currently houses BLEAK HOUSE, HARD TIMES, HUCKLEBERRY FINN, THE GREAT GATSBY and numerous other classics.

It almost makes you want to go blind, doesn't it?