How A Compulsive Reader Rolls

My name is Mare and I’m a compulsive reader.  When there are none of the below outlets for me to peruse, I read posters in the doctors office, signs in the windows of fast food places, those little A-frame advertisements on restaurant tables for seasonal drinks and desserts.  And I’ll read them over and over again until the doctor or the traffic signal or the meal arriving interrupts my obsession.  I’m not looking for a way to cure myself.  Far from it!  I’m embracing all the ways to read!

Books will never go the way of the dinosaur.  There will always be people like me and Captain Jean Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise who will have a soft spot for paper in this increasing age of technological libris. 

Or the people of Milton Keynes, who staged a campaign to empty their library of books, to show the evil town council the need for the Stony Stratford branch library (read story:   http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/14/stony-stratford-library-shelves-protest).

Our house is filled with shelves of books and piles of magazines.  I have a standing Saturday morning date at my local library, dropping off what I’ve finished that week and picking up new material.  It thrills me to be the first to put a Newly Acquired book on hold. Sometimes I stop into the bookstore on the ground level and a few times a year they hold book sales, too!  And still, this is not enough for me, the compulsive reader. 

I love the Kindle app on my phone, because even if I’ve found myself in a situation where I don’t have a real book (??!!), I always have something to read (yes, I always have my phone with me…).  I buy books for my Kindle that aren’t in the catalog of my local library.  What my library does have, though, are e-books you can download through Amazon to the Kindle app, which I’ve done several times.  Also, there’s a trend recently for authors to write short stories or novella’s exclusively as e-book content.  They usually run from .99 cents to around $5.99 and serve as welcome little treats between full books.  Read my latest Old School Mare blog post to see how I’m using my actual Kindle device for school: http://oldschoolmare.blogspot.com/2013/07/bonjour-mes-ami.html

  

I have a problem with magazines.  I find them a great temptation and, as stated, have heaping piles of them wherever I sit for more than 10 minutes…  When I bought the Kindle, I was hoping to use that for magazine subscriptions.  What I didn’t realize is that the black and white Kindles don’t support magazines…  Someday I will get a Kindle Fire but for now, my local library has a subscription to Zinio, an online magazine system.  Their selection is limited at this point but I have been able to access issues to read the one or two articles I was interested in without having to pay the $4 or $5 to do so.  Awesome!

The other thing I’ve been doing lately is getting books on CD’s at the library.  I download them to my phone and listen when I’m walking or at other times when I can pay them most of my attention (making jewelry, washing dishes, shaving my legs).  Usually, the books I find on CD’s are things I may not have noticed in my usual sections of the library (mystery and non-fiction/travel), like The Girls of Murder City about the women who the play and movie Chicago are based on and Then Again, Diane Keaton’s autobiography read with good humor and emotion by Keaton herself.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve gone to the Dark Side by embracing alternative reading methods.  My father ran a printing press for most of his working life (it was at a box factory, but a pressman is a pressman…) plus my Day Job is doing payroll for a local shoppers publication that has seen a sharp downturn in recent years.  But I think as the world changes, some things diminish and other things expand in a natural progression.  Writers still write and readers still read and the variety of ways we can partake of words and sentences and paragraphs will always keep the Force strong within us.

Do What You Love!

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