August 24, 2007
For my graduation at the end of April, David continued his tradition of giving me the perfect gift by presenting me with an eReader. The reader finally harmonizes my two favorite pastimes: reading and travel. They've been out of sync until now because as much as I love traveling, I need to read. I just have to know that I have a book on hand. Since it can be difficult to find books in English when we're traveling, it doesn't even have to be a book I would normally read, it just has to be a book I can understand and have the bare outlines of a plot. We've had trips where the space/weight limitation of carrying enough books for me to read has been too great and then I turn into a listless faintly pathetic figure. As opposed to usual.
But the eReader solves the space/weight problem: before we left Pittsburgh we downloaded 327 book onto it. 327! (It actually holds a whole lot more with the 4 gig card, but we ran out of time to put more on.) Most of the titles are copyright-expired books from Project Gutenburg, a really impressive endeavor to provide ebooks for free. So I have all of Jane Austen's books, some Agatha Christie, both of whom I adore, and then lots of classics.
I do have more contemporary works, too, though. Sony's site gave us a $50.00 credit when we signed up, so by a judicious perusal of their 'packs' I made out like a bandit. I have four Tony Hillerman mysteries, Asimov's Foundation trilogy, Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, five historical romances (what, like you've never needed to read something completely frivolous to relax?), and a David Sedaris book, for some non-fiction.
Now my only problem is that because I have so much to read, I don't always want to leave the tent. Maybe there's a book about that.
