Speaking of Reading, the Kindle

 Amazon has come out with its often discussed new upgrade of the reader called Kindle, and I would be tempted to start lusting after one.  But though I take drops every day to keep glaucoma under control, and though I have a set of prescription glasses, and though I have mild cataracts in both eyes, especially in the right, I am still trying to make it through with naked eye or my el cheapo reading glasses.  So the 6-inch KIndle screen doesn't say much to me, when I am seldom far from my little battery of desktop computers with a 23-inch monitor for a couple and a 19-inch on the others (via the wonders of KVM switches).   So that looks like yet another great argument for staying home as much as I do, and I don't see why I would need a Kindle, though admittedly it's probably no worse than reading my now very aged paperbacks.

My wife swears by using the local public library almost exclusively, but I get most of the books I read from our own shelves.  Admittedly, quite often lately I've ended up with a pile of loose, crumbling pages with fading print and for which a binding is very much a thing of the past.   But this is why I bought those books and then held on to them for such a long time, just for later times like these.   And at this point it's like I'm reading them all for the first time, though actually I did read most of them a while ago, and some more than once.   I figure that for me, the passage of about 10 years is enough to make any book a brand new read again, and all I retain is a general impression of whether or not it was a good book.

I wish I knew somebody around here who has a Kindle, so that I could get a first-hand look.   My wife belongs to a very active book club, and I think she does know somebody who has one.   I'll have to ask, when she gets back from another of her long visits to Florida.