More books!

The absolute rubbish that I am reading at the moment is an absolute delight.

The Sony e-book reader (to which all praise) encourages the mean and mendicant to search web sites for free e-books to fill what used to be regarded as industrial quantities of memory with books that one doesn’t really want to read.

I now have a vast selection of classic texts that I have quoted from but not read waiting in the electronic darkness of the machine for those quiet hours when I decide that I should fill the classical gaps in my reading experience.

At the moment however I have read one science fiction book which I would never have the bare faced anti intellectual audacity to flaunt in ‘real’ book life. I’ve also read a fantasy book which was better written but as each chapter slipped by I could sense time passing which I could not easily justify. I suppose that some of this high academic pose was undermined by the avidity with which I devoured these tomes.

I have used this reading device so much that I have actually managed to exhaust the battery. Now the e-book reader is sold with the advertising information that you could read War and Peace three times before the battery becomes exhausted. I started to add up the pages and realised that I had indeed read my way through a veritable electronic forest of pages.

As is always the way with electronic devices, the real problems appear when you cut corners with the technical ways of treating the device. This one decided to have a hissy fit when it was being recharged. Basically all you have to do to recharge the device is plug it into the computer. It then uses the USB port to charge. You must, however, take care with how and when you take the device from the machine.

Those of us who have had things like ipods refuse point blank to work after they have been untimely ripped from the parent device are usually reasonably careful about clicking on the little ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ icon to ensure a safe unlinking.

Sometimes, in spite of painstaking attention to detail and being punctilious in the clicking on the correct device designation the notice that it is OK to remove hardware is an out and out lie.

So it was with the device after it had been left on overnight to ensure a full recharge.

Horror piled on horror as the bloody thing refused to work. Then refused to turn off. Then to shut down. Then to reset. This then exhausted the full repertoire of my approaches to recalcitrant electronic devices.

After a frustrating number of long moments I discovered that there are advantages to knowing an electrician with an instinctive understanding of the ways of things with screens and buttons.

It is now back in working order and is quietly taking its charge like a good little device.

I must hunt for more bad books to fill my days with the forbidden delights of stylistically inept, badly structured, self indulgent verbiage.

Sound familiar?