My tastes in reading have changed. I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise, but it was to me.

So, I’ve had an iPad since the first day the iPad 1 came out. And I’ve been reading books in the Kindle reader for iPad almost that long. I am a long-time book reader. In fact, when I got the iPad I didn’t think that ebooks would hold that much of a draw for me. After all, I love the feel of a good book in my hand, the smell of the glue holding the perfect binding of the paperbacks together, the crispness of the pages, yes, even the jolt awake when the hardback falls into my face while reading in bed. But in the two years since the iPad 1 has come out, I’ve changed. I like to think of it as growing. Now, I prefer to read books on my iPad, iPod, and in the cloud reader on my laptop. I love that when I get to page 110 on my iPad, I can open up my iPod and be right there on that page. This is better than when in Jr. High I learned how to almost subconsciously remember where I was in a book without bookmarks to combat the teasing people who would grab my books from me and move or remove the markers in an effort to thwart my knowing where I was. (I also learned the best hiding places for reading at my Jr. High—back in the library stacks on one of the lowest shelves where no books were stored was the best. No bullies ever venture into the library.) When Apple changed the rules and removed the bookstore links from the apps, I quickly bookmarked your site in my mobile Safari and made sure that that bookmark was synched to all my devices. And when you announced the Kindle Store, I saved the location as an app on my iPad so I could always get to it quickly.

I was reading an article yesterday about how facial recognition is getting so good that there are apps being built for cellphones that can identify random strangers from photos (taken as you walk along with your cell phone). The article was bemoaning the fact that this was a “further invasion of our privacy” and that pretty soon nothing we do would be private. I then moved on to another article that talked about how Google(?) was working on an algorithm that could evaluate the writing style of someone online and make a good correlation as to who actually wrote it. Even if the author had posted anonymously or with a pseudonym. The article was bemoaning the fact that this was a “further invasion of our privacy” and that pretty soon nothing that we do online would be private. But is this idea of “privacy” such a good thing? Ultimately, what it really is is the idea that we can go out in public or online and be anonymous. And some people see anonymity as the same as the freedom to do anything they want. And as we saw in London over the past few days, anything they want seems to cover a wide swath of things that most civilized societies consider wrong. Some examples of things anonymous people do:

I love reading Marc’s Green Living Blog. I do try to be conscious of eco-friendly or green choices, but his blog offers so much more than just that. Yesterday’s post “Finally, My Flying Car is Here” is a great example! I mean, would you really think of flying cars as something green? I mean, heck, they’re totally important, don’t get me wrong. As an avid Sci-Fi reader I’ve been waiting for the promised flying car for years! But to learn that not only is this car legal to fly with only 20 hours of flying time, but it also gets better gas mileage than my truck. Now if they’d just invent a flying trailer to go with it - or a truck that gets better than 13MPG and can still tow a 2-horse trailer. In other news: Jaryth’s site is back up. So if you’ve been jonesing for pictures like this, your wait is over. I’ve built it so that I can add new pictures by just uploading them into a directory. Lazy, yes, but heck, the photos are on the site again, so I’m happy, and hopefully his faraway relatives are too. ☺ I asked him to “smile” as I took the picture. This is the result. [caption id=“attachment_145” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Jaryth Smiling for the Camera”][/caption]

I’m currently reading Booklife and one thing that he mentions is the idea that school literature programs have made people bad readers. At first I was somewhat taken aback by this assertion, but as I read more about what his premise was, I started to agree with him. In a nutshell: in literature classes in high school and college we are taught to read literature with an eye towards what is not written. In other words, you’re supposed to find the allegory, the symbolism, the hidden meanings. Doing this is fun because for one thing it’s a pretty creative way of reading. If the meaning you are positing is “hidden” then the fact that no one else can see it just proves your point more. In fact, as long as you can argue your interpretation effectively it doesn’t matter that no one else can see it. If you’re persuasive enough, everyone will see it (if only to get you to stop harping at them). But what does this mean for reading later? If you’re always looking for the hidden meaning in something, then there’s a good chance you’ll miss the overt meaning. In High School, I had to read the Hemingway story “Hills Like White Elephants”. This story stuck in my head because it was the first time I ever really understood what people were seeing when they found these hidden meanings. (Thank you Mr. Duncanson.) I’m not saying that I really believed they were there, but we read that story so many times that I started to believe that the story might have actually been about elephants - not just descriptively titled. My question to that class is, do you remember what the story was about, what the text said? In other words, not the pregnancy, or the idea that the character was trying to talk her into an abortion. None of that was actually said. Do you remember what the scene was? My guess is that most people don’t remember, because we got so hung up in the hidden story. Where was it set? What were they doing? To badly mangle another quote: “sometimes and elephant is just an elephant”. Perhaps if we started reading things looking for the un-hidden meaning first we might have an easier time understanding what people are trying to tell us. Why I Like Science Fiction If you read most scifi books with an eye to what is said, and not what is not said, you’ll get the basics of most books. Literary snobs might argue that that makes the books less interesting - but I find them plenty interesting. And they don’t have to be obfuscated to hold my attention. Don’t get me wrong, in re-reading “Hills Like White Elephants” 25 years after my first read, I was profoundly moved by the story. Most of the allegory that we discovered in that long-ago class has disappeared into where ever memories go when they aren’t used. And I suspect that a lot of the reason I found it difficult at age 17 was because of my age and lack of experience. But I still enjoyed the story first as a description of a couple sitting in a foreign train station, waiting for a train, and discussing their life together (or not) and what they were going to do.