teal dear about me, books and reading
(I originally started this entry when I was pregnant with the Q, when my belly was big enough to make a nice spot to rest a book when reading. The Q did not find this as entertaining, and always attempt to kick the book off of his butt).
I started reading print fiction again last year, and it got me thinking about how I engage with physical and internet-based texts and how that's changed over the years.
I've always been a voracious reader. As a kid, and through my 20s I went nowhere without a book. One of my mother's apocryphal childhood stories about me is the one where I had my special box of books that I would drag into the bathroom with me every time I went. When I would go visit my dad in the summer, he'd let me loose in Waldenbooks, and then have to buy me two extra suitcases to get all my new books home. They made a special exemption for me at the library, letting me check out huge stacks of books every two weeks. And the best day of my childhood? When the Bookmobile started coming to our neighborhood, so I only had to haul my stack of 20 books a block, instead of on the bus through a transfer.
After I got into fandom in 2003 and started reading more online, I pretty much stopped reading print books. I went from 50+ a year to 10 or so, and then just 2-3 a year (when I was younger I easily clocked 150+ a year, and not short stuff - I was reading from the adult SF section by 11). But I was still reading the same amount, if not more. Just where and what I was reading changed: fic, personal journals and topical blogs, news articles, online magazines, following wide-ranging discussions across multiple communities and media (RaceFail, all stripes of social justice/activism blogs, news, science blogs, etc).
But even that level of reading declined after a while and in hindsight it became clear that my health became the most significant obstacle to reading anything (especially print books), though it took me years to realize it. I developed debilitating chronic pain around 2004 that included my joints, especially my hands, and significant cognitive impact (attention span, brain fog, diminished reading comprehension). I eventually figured out it was caused by gluten intolerance/celiac a couple of years ago, and about the same time I realized that not only could I not concentrate on reading/comprehending anything for more than 30 minutes on a good day, I physically could not hold a book for more than 20-30 minutes. Then I got pregnant, which isn't exactly easy on the hands, either. I have no idea if this will resolve itself now that I'm not beating the crap out of my body, or if the damage is permanent.
So I'd been contemplating an e-reader for a while, since I had a backlog of fic and other internet items that was terrifying, and wanted some way to read short pieces when I was away from the computer. I didn't like reading on my iTouch, but most of the e-readers out there were still to big/too heavy. Then the 3rd gen Kindles came out and both in size and weight were just what I was looking for.
I expected to catch up on a lot of fic, because an electronic medium for fic was my normal way of engaging with it. I did NOT expect that I would completely re-engage with books on the Kindle, since I still saw books as a print medium, and couldn't wrap my head around reading them in an electronic format on a regular basis. But wow, I got over the books=print thing really quickly, and frankly, with the exception of a few authors whom I want to collect in hard copy, I don't see myself going back to print books again.
With the Kindle I'm reading 4-5 books a month (thanks in part to being able to read when the Q is napping on me in the evenings), and can read for an hour stretch without pain. I'm reading a wider range of stuff, because it's mentally easier to buy an ebook as an experiment because 1. I don't have to shelve it or donate it if I don't like it, and 2. It's (way, way too easy, says my budget) to click on a button to buy something that looks interesting/was recommended than it is to go to the bookstore, hunt it down and buy a physical copy that I then can't hold.
I'm still using it for fic (thank you, Archive of Our Own, for the ebook format download option!) and for short fiction, but really, I've once again become all about books. It's like I've gotten a piece of myself back that I'd forgotten even existed, and it's FUCKING AWESOME.
So I've come around in a weird circle to reading the things I used to before the internet/fandom, but now in the electronic medium that's characterized my interactions with text since fandom (i.e. reading texts electronically, using social networking options like livejournal and Goodreads to interact with books the way I interact with fannish/web content). The confluence of the internets, fandom, technology and external factors have brought me back to the things I used to read, but have permanently changed the way I read them.
I started reading print fiction again last year, and it got me thinking about how I engage with physical and internet-based texts and how that's changed over the years.
I've always been a voracious reader. As a kid, and through my 20s I went nowhere without a book. One of my mother's apocryphal childhood stories about me is the one where I had my special box of books that I would drag into the bathroom with me every time I went. When I would go visit my dad in the summer, he'd let me loose in Waldenbooks, and then have to buy me two extra suitcases to get all my new books home. They made a special exemption for me at the library, letting me check out huge stacks of books every two weeks. And the best day of my childhood? When the Bookmobile started coming to our neighborhood, so I only had to haul my stack of 20 books a block, instead of on the bus through a transfer.
After I got into fandom in 2003 and started reading more online, I pretty much stopped reading print books. I went from 50+ a year to 10 or so, and then just 2-3 a year (when I was younger I easily clocked 150+ a year, and not short stuff - I was reading from the adult SF section by 11). But I was still reading the same amount, if not more. Just where and what I was reading changed: fic, personal journals and topical blogs, news articles, online magazines, following wide-ranging discussions across multiple communities and media (RaceFail, all stripes of social justice/activism blogs, news, science blogs, etc).
But even that level of reading declined after a while and in hindsight it became clear that my health became the most significant obstacle to reading anything (especially print books), though it took me years to realize it. I developed debilitating chronic pain around 2004 that included my joints, especially my hands, and significant cognitive impact (attention span, brain fog, diminished reading comprehension). I eventually figured out it was caused by gluten intolerance/celiac a couple of years ago, and about the same time I realized that not only could I not concentrate on reading/comprehending anything for more than 30 minutes on a good day, I physically could not hold a book for more than 20-30 minutes. Then I got pregnant, which isn't exactly easy on the hands, either. I have no idea if this will resolve itself now that I'm not beating the crap out of my body, or if the damage is permanent.
So I'd been contemplating an e-reader for a while, since I had a backlog of fic and other internet items that was terrifying, and wanted some way to read short pieces when I was away from the computer. I didn't like reading on my iTouch, but most of the e-readers out there were still to big/too heavy. Then the 3rd gen Kindles came out and both in size and weight were just what I was looking for.
I expected to catch up on a lot of fic, because an electronic medium for fic was my normal way of engaging with it. I did NOT expect that I would completely re-engage with books on the Kindle, since I still saw books as a print medium, and couldn't wrap my head around reading them in an electronic format on a regular basis. But wow, I got over the books=print thing really quickly, and frankly, with the exception of a few authors whom I want to collect in hard copy, I don't see myself going back to print books again.
With the Kindle I'm reading 4-5 books a month (thanks in part to being able to read when the Q is napping on me in the evenings), and can read for an hour stretch without pain. I'm reading a wider range of stuff, because it's mentally easier to buy an ebook as an experiment because 1. I don't have to shelve it or donate it if I don't like it, and 2. It's (way, way too easy, says my budget) to click on a button to buy something that looks interesting/was recommended than it is to go to the bookstore, hunt it down and buy a physical copy that I then can't hold.
I'm still using it for fic (thank you, Archive of Our Own, for the ebook format download option!) and for short fiction, but really, I've once again become all about books. It's like I've gotten a piece of myself back that I'd forgotten even existed, and it's FUCKING AWESOME.
So I've come around in a weird circle to reading the things I used to before the internet/fandom, but now in the electronic medium that's characterized my interactions with text since fandom (i.e. reading texts electronically, using social networking options like livejournal and Goodreads to interact with books the way I interact with fannish/web content). The confluence of the internets, fandom, technology and external factors have brought me back to the things I used to read, but have permanently changed the way I read them.