July 2, 2014 ・ General

Summer Reading: Why Audiobooks are the way to go!

“Beach reading” conjures up ultra-light fiction for lazy summer days spent soaking up the sun. You leave behind the bleakly serious academic literature, the strictly composed 18th century poetry, the epic tomes, and the fact-based nonfiction. All of those bulky textbooks stay at home, too, gathering dust until autumn. Now is the time for easy, breezy, reading meant for pure entertainment. You want the kind of fun reading you can do while sipping a cool beverage at your favorite oceanside, poolside, or lakeside destination.

The Carefree Option

But when you want the ultimate summer reading experience, tune out

January 7, 2014 ・ Books

On anthropomorphising the book genres…

I have an odd imagination; my husband tells me this constantly. I think of the oddest of things at times when you might least expect it. For instance, I glimpsed this morning’s newsletter with last week’s blog post opening sentence and I said to myself, “What kind of personalities would book genres be if they were people?” And then I thought that might make for an interesting blog post; so here goes…

Obligatory disclaimer: There are hundreds of genres and sub-genres and if I attempt to figure them all out we’ll be here all year so I

December 30, 2013 ・ Books

How to Take Charge of Your Reading Fears

As an avid horror reader in my teenaged years, my mother would often caution me about how much of “that trash” I read, to be careful I didn’t fill my head with horrors so terrible that it tainted my soul. My mother is quite religious and thus the “taint your soul” aspect of her cautions were almost inevitable. Her argument was that we become what we fill our hearts and minds with. Thus if I read too much horror stories, I would become horrible myself.

I guess there might be a certain amount of logic in that. Lately,

December 19, 2013 ・ Technology

How safe are the eBooks on your eReader?

When the Kindle first hit the market, we were all still trying to figure out how Amazon was going to be engineering the move from hardback books to digital formatting. At first, the offerings were limited and in some cases the quality was sub-standard. OCR software mistakes were obvious and irritating. Gradually, however, the Kindle library grew in both quantity and quality as more and more books became available in digital form.

I think Amazon neglected to put enough checks in place, however, because in early to mid 2009, they were at the center of a furore over

November 18, 2013 ・ Technology

Now that we have more eReaders options … which one should I get?

Just last week, an old friend asked me a question that boiled down to which eReader I would choose if I were buying anew. To sum it up best, I coined a new poetic mantra for myself:

“When I read, it is all I want to do … no distractions, no fanfare; just me and the words”

For me, that is enough.

I wish I had the wherewithal, however, to explore all the tablet and eReader choices out there so that I could give more informed advice. That being said, I still think it boils down to a