Carol,
I am a reader, a collector, a feeler of books. I buy some just to caress them, hold them, look at them, smell the age, and enjoy the fact that they have names and dates from a last century that is soon to be even further away in time. I travel on business and my past time is searching used book stores for the creations of minds just a little bit to far out on the edge. I treat these discoveries just as one of my 'dog' stocks doing a good run up. I have amassed a library that I sometimes just sit and look at...just for the pleasure. I can travel anywhere I like, when I like, just by going to my books shelves and moving through the centuries or regions of the earth or the universe.
I threw out my TV years ago. I Hate them, and am offended when I go to someone's house and the TV is left on. I leave. I just can not put up with them for more than a half hour.....plus I have the unfortunate luck of always seeing the same thing. I have seen perhaps 4 episodes of Sienfeld. The last two times were repeats of the first two times. TV's sense my disgust for them and reply with regurgitated pap that is only fit to add to chicken manure to feed the cattle.
I found speed reading a real joy as the stories came alive and flew across my mind like a movie. But I also like to feel the phrases, and metaphors of the lines; and sometimes read so slowly I fall in and out of sleep, not knowing if I am dreaming the book or the book is dreaming me...Long slow days of drifting in and out of a book, living with the writer, eating, sleeping, dreaming, and sometimes having to go back and reread the chapter because I want to know whose mind really had that experience.....
I have half a dozen books I can flee to. Old, trusted friends that take me to places time and again. Hornblower, Iron Coffins, Guy Sager's Forgotten Soldier, Capsticks' Death in the ... series, The Sea and the Jungle by Tomlinson , the assorted SF read and reread. ...Others just sit on my shelf...waiting...
Books are still better than any electronic media. They have a longer life, they need no machinery or power to access, their system of access is elegant and simple. They are more secure. When is the last time a book just crashed and was gone?? They are beautiful in and of themselves....
And good books are better than gold....they hold their value and seem to have an upward appreciation trend.....
Well that's my take on books....
Regards,
mnmuench |
