From bottom to top, the books I read in the last three months were Bleak House by Charles Dickens, The Prairie by James Fenimore Cooper, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, Persuasion by Jane Austen, A Hero of Our Time by Mikhael Lermontov, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, The Professor by Charlotte Bronte, Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, The Pearl by John Steinbeck, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.
The books that are turned around so you see the pages instead of the spine are stand-ins for books that I read on an e-reader and don't own a hard copy. This last quarter I relied most heavily on the e-reader, as I had finally read most of the books I already owned but hadn't read yet, and was moving on to books I wanted to read but didn't own. In the end, I really found that there are a lot of great books that I enjoyed reading, but will probably only reread once or twice in my life. It's not worth it for me to keep a book for years just because I might want to read it again someday, and these classic novels can be found in any library, or for free online since they're in the public domain.
Which brings me to the e-reader. I got an e-reader in June, and it was very handy when traveling and when reading really long books that would be heavy to hold for hours on end. However, because I'm a fast reader and the screen is fairly small, I have to turn the page (technically, refresh the screen) every 30 seconds or so, and this creates a short delay that jars me out of my mental reading zone every. single. time. Because of this, I found that I read a lot slower using an e-reader than I do using a book, so I still prefer reading a book when possible. That said, I do not regret my e-reader purchase at all. It's great for the purposes I mentioned above, and it's also more convenient to quickly load a new book onto it than to make a 30 minute round trip drive to the library.
2 comments:
I still hate my e-reader, for the page-turning reason. It took me two weeks to read Wuthering Heights on my nook, as opposed to the two hours it would have taken with a physical copy. Also, I'm terrified that the battery will go dead, and I'm constantly checking the strength indicator (or whatever you call it). I'm glad you like yours, but I just can't bring myself to use mine.
I should note that it didn't take two weeks of constant reading to finish the book, but my frustration kept forcing me to put it down and not pick it back up, which has never happened with Wuthering Heights before.
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