Monday, April 5, 2010

Reading roll

Getting a library card to me has always been like getting the okay to raid the candy store. I mean, you can check out any book on any thing......What more could a person ask for who loves to read? I'm still one of the hard or soft cover hold outs. We got Katie a Kindle for Christmas, but she has storage issues, so I can see her need for digital books. I love flipping the pages, getting to the end and seeing what type face was used, the feel of the paper. Gosh, working at a printing company will do that to you, I suppose. I mean, I had to learn how to put a 16 page and 32 page signature (individual pages printed on one large sheet of paper) together in order to print them correctly when they were folded and bound to put into a magazine or book.

I know there's lots of people who like to listen to books on tape but I'm not one of them. I really love the reading, and for me it's much faster. After all, you read using vision and light, so theoricately you could read at the speed of light, whereas you can only listen at the speed of sound! Recently I have been working through Robert B. Parker's novels, concentrating on the Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall series. They are quite addictive because they are such a fast read. I love the terse, concise dialog between the characters. While doing this post I had to look up something about Mr. Parker and found out he had passed away in January. When an author or artist dies, then all the future stories or works they could have created are no more. I know that is true of the death of anyone--all those potential futures just wiped away. I will miss not knowing what Jesse Stone will do in Paradise, just like I miss Lt. Joe Leaphorn from Tony Hillerman's series.