Monday, December 23, 2013

Book reading preferences.

I remember when the ebook readers first came out. I said "not for me, I love holding a book, I will never read books that way." Then...I bought my first high end cell phone. I immediately purchased a book of short stories by John Steinbeck, (one of my go-to authors) and downloaded to my little cell phone. I have been reading his works since Kensington High School, "The Pearl" was the first story of his that I read, and only because it was assigned reading. That is all it took, over the years, I started collecting all of his books. I found some very rare ones when I went with SweetHusband to out of the way book stores all over WNY. He is a book collector indeed. Then I began to think how selfish I was to hoard these works of his, so after collecting them for 10 years, I donated them to our local library book sale. I hope someone who loved JS as much as I did found them. Then last year, I purchased a KINDLE FIRE, not for the book reading capabilities, but it was just too neat not to buy! Email, facebook, great web browsing and yes, Kindle is known for it's user friendly book app. At first, I purchased low cost books on Amazon, and then I got brave and went onto the county library ebook site. I was able to use their tutorial to set everything up, and it worked! Free books, how can that not be a good thing eh? Granted, sometimes I need to be put on a hold list, but hey, free is free. And if I download a book that does not read as well as I thought, just press "return and delete", no trips to the library needed. Those last few words are scary, what if so many people who used the library for taking out books turn to ereaders like I did? Will they all close? Will children miss out on the wonderful experience I had of going to the Roosevelt Library and taking out books? New literary worlds, just waiting to share their landscapes to me. Who can forget reading My Antonia, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or all those stories recommended by the librarian-she knew my reading patterns and always had suggestions for me. One non-library reading that I loved was "The Golden Book of Knowledge." SMom bought those from Loblaws where she worked, I would read them cover to cover-each week was a different book, filled with colorful illustrations explaining everything from A-Z that you did not know you needed to learn about. When my SChildren were small, they were being sold again at Bells Supermarkets,I bought them, slightly different from the ones we had as a child, but still fascinating. Reading to the kids, I seemed to enjoy them even more than my SC. I still have them, and shared with SGrandSon, he was slightly interested-just to be polite. I also love to read Cookbooks, especially old ones. The instructions they used are so interesting, you would think that a recipe is a recipe, but the cooking terms, types of food and way of describing the recipe all seem to be in a foreign tongue sometimes. And how our eating habits have changed over the years: butter, big chunks of red meat were the stars and no such thing as "add one package of instant pudding", or "melt in microwave!" A SCousin just bought me "Come Home to Supper" by Christy Jordan. She is a strong religious woman who has her family right up there in the important list-talks about making time for her kids and husband, and treating each day as a gift to do what you want. And, by the way, she offers some great recipes-I have followed her online for a few years and her recipes always turn out. And, I send the link to her recipes to myself on email, then cook while reading the recipe on my Kindle-how insane is that? I always worry that my Kindle screen will end up with the same stains and splatters that my cookbook pages have on our favorite recipes :) If I couldn't read, I would not be able to cook, cereal for three meals a day for us would be the norm. So bottom line, never judge new finagled inventions, you might be using one when you least expect. Thanks for reading, here is your reward, click here: Julia Child

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