More Books
A Library In My Pocket
The first thing I ever downloaded from the internet was a PDF. Zohra Greenhalgh’s Contrarywise, about a Trickster spirit. The sequel, Trickster’s Touch, was second by a few minutes.
His name means mischief... Rimble, the Trickster, is a merry god - dancing through streets as a gust of leaves, hobbling along canals as an old hag, roaming through gardens as a wiry dog. And where Rimble travels, trouble follows. Trouble of a most peculiar nature.
— Contrarywise
That was the beginning. I have acquired a few more books, and MP3 music files, since that time.
Before PDFs, before the internet, I used to carry books around with me. Physical books. I’d carry them in my coat pockets, my bags … I was never without them.
You can imagine how much of a relief it was to find PDFs and, later, EPUBs. I don’t have a Kindle, and my Kobo died on me years ago.
The best thing about having a tablet, along with a microSD card to take the library of tomes, is that no matter how many ebooks I carry with me, the weight stays the same - the weight of my tablet.
Looking at my library of ebooks, mind you, I find myself asking one pertinent question. Does anybody else read the books I do?
Among the books I carry, I have multiple copies of Sunzi The Art of War, Laozi Daodejing, books by Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Niccolo Machiavelli, David Barron’s books Building Your Cult and Motivational Imperative, and Chase Hughes’ The Six-Minute X-Ray and The Behaviour Ops Manual.
Some other people might read biographies of celebrities, sports people, politicians. I read Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power and The Laws of Human Nature. I also have several occult and esoteric books, and reading from them has given me many a happy night.
You might think a Jilly Cooper story might be risqué, but I carry several erotica books by Anais Nin. And I just landed an epub of the Kama Sutra just to say I have read it.
All these add to a very esoteric library.
I’m probably going to have to buy a bigger microSD card one of these days, just to store my epubs and PDFs. I already migrated to a better PDF reader than Adobe Acrobat - one which reads epubs and PDFs.
I only wish the technology had been around earlier, when I was still in my third or fourth instar. However, I am happy enough to have had all this time to acquire the technology, and the books I carry with me.
Perhaps my second through fourth instars, deprived of tech but with an abundance of choice of real books, gave me just the right amount of appreciation of reading to give me the experience I needed to enjoy reading these books in electronic form.
My real book library made me the electronic bookworm I am today.