When I was a kid I enjoyed reading anything I could get my hands on. My mom came into the kitchen on more than one occasion finding me parked in front of a bowl of Super Sugar Smacks reading our phone book.
The telephone directory pictured above is not from our small town but it looks identical to the CONTEL phone book we had of the same year. When my paternal side of the family decided to sell the business, we had a collection of every phone book for the area from 1969 to 2010.
I’m digressing.
I would often be reading the phone book because I didn’t have anything else at hand to read at the moment. I gleaned a lot of information from the phone book, because after all, the phone book holds a lot of information, and I started memorizing phone numbers without even realizing it. For example, today I can still recite the phone number for the main office of my alma mater and for my elementary school, though I have no reason whatsoever to call these people and I have probably never called these numbers in my life. They were just there in the phone book.
Like many geeks I have tried to move from reading books to using their electronic equivalents, namely, the Kindle app from Amazon or Apple Books. I usually try to read using these apps on one of the iPads I’ve had over the years. And with the turning of the clocks to the New Year I have come to one solid realization.
I hate electronic books.
I don’t feel connected to what I’m reading. I don’t like having my eyes lit up in a darkened room by the words on the “page” and I feel like I’m actually just using a bunch of web pages.
Give me a real, printed book anyway.
Now, I’ve never had an Amazon Kindle with E-ink, which doesn’t rely on backlighting, so I don’t know if I would enjoy that reading experience. A couple of weeks ago my husband and I browsed around our local Bookmans, which is a delightful used book store with lots and lots of interesting things to read. I purchased a book on storm chasing that I’m currently reading and before going to sleep for the night it’s quite nice to not have an iPad staring me in the face as I’m starting to feel sleepy.
I’ve often quipped that the reason we have school violence is because students are no longer high on the fluid to make ditto copies. Perhaps we’re all getting cranky because we have too much blue light staring us in the face all the time.
I’m finding myself much happier settling down with a book before calling it a night. It’s a shame we don’t have a phone book in the house, just in case I have a literary emergency.
