It is Friday night; shortly to be Saturday. Everyone has gone to bed and I have a sudden urge to write. I don’t have a sudden urge to read at the moment. In fact I am a little perturbed by my recent lack of reading, other than excellent articles on the internet and a whole load of extremely tedious documents for work.
But that is all in the past. I have a new awakening, and I am ready to read; even discipline myself to do it regularly. And the fact that I have just been made redundant will hopefully give me a little flexibility to fit all manner of reading into my daily discipline of meditation, calm and a little dose of self-indulgence.
Which is why I am utterly delighted to have discovered a couple of things that will assist me in my task.
A few months ago, I downloaded the Amazon Kindle application to my phone. I then loaded a few free books that I thought I might like to read one of these days; “Diary of A Nobody” by George Grossmith which is a book I have been meaning to read for decades, ever since I spotted it in my Mum’s downstairs loo (the room, that is!) or a mass of books on Zen. Having read part of another book, “Sophie’s World” by Jostein Gaarder, I felt a need to look more closely at some of the philosopher’s mentioned and so I have also recently downloaded “Ethics” by Aristotle and with a healthy amount of synchronicity, “The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates” by Xenophon who just happened to be the subject of “In Our Time” on Radio Four this week. How spooky is that!
They are all there, ready to be read, as are the masses of hard copy books that are collecting at the side of my bed shouting, “read me, read me!” as I guiltily fall into my nightly coma.
Now, the thing with the phone application is that it is brilliantly convenient. When I am travelling now, I tend to read rather than play endless rounds of word games. Although the phone is relatively small it does the trick and I love flicking through the “pages” with speed as I engross myself in a book. And I am not alone. There are masses of people on the trains these days with electronic reading matter rather than a solid book in hand.
At this point, I feel a need to reiterate that nothing beats the feeling of real page flicking and holding a real book in your hands. Furthermore, I love nothing more than browsing peoples’ bookshelves to see what they are reading. Maybe that is my implicit nosiness because the books on peoples ‘shelves (or lack of them) says quite a lot about an individual or a family in my opinion. And whilst I embrace the ease of the Kindle and other electronic forms of reading, I feel it would be an immense pity to hide one’s reading material so that other’s cannot get a glimpse of who you are and what makes you tick when they walk into your house.
As it happens, the head of Amazon was on the radio this week and he mentioned that the electronic book sales had outstripped hard copies for the first time this month; an astounding amount of downloads and he carefully reminded potential customers that there are hundreds and thousands of titles that are totally free; accessible to anyone.
But, I hear you say. Not everyone has a Kindle or and iPhone that they can transport around. In fact some people would see such purchases as irrelevant.
And in some ways they would be right, for as I was researching the Kindle machine the other day, I came across a link which said you could download a programme that would turn your laptop, tablet, netbook etc into a Kindle.
I immediately downloaded the programme and as if by magic, all the books that I had purchased with my phone application appeared in front of me on my netbook computer. How brilliant is that!
Not only that but as I turned to “Sophie’s World”, the book I am currently reading, it managed to synchronise as though by default to the chapter I had been reading on the train earlier in the day via my iPhone.
I’m not a scientist and I have no desire to know how that happens but I do marvel at the brilliance of such technology and the ability for me, as the consumer, to link between phone and computer without too many unnecessary tapping on the keyboard to find my place.
So if you haven’t done so already – here is the link to the Kindle for the PC.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000423913
But this is not all in my ongoing literary exploration. There is another website that is going to help me on my journey of learning.
Recently the BBC has developed their Desert Island Discs site. Gradually they are uploading more and more programmes from their archives and you can now see the choices that the famous and the interesting have made over the many years since Roy Plomley first introduced us to this incredible island.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs
So, if you want to know how many people have taken Bob Dylan songs for a trip overseas to the deserted island, all you have to do is place the great man’s name in the search engine and you will find that his discs have made it to the island 90 times. The Beatles have been transported 250 times whilst Elvis has made it over 71 times.
“Land of Hope and Glory” is a top hit with some folk, making an island journey 56 times, and oh how interesting it is to see who has chosen that one!
But it is not all about music.
For instance, I now know that 43 people have chosen to take “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy on their deserted island, including this week’s castaway Deborah Harry.
Although Ms. Blondie didn’t ooze with personality during the interview, I did empathise with her at the end when she was horror-stricken at the thought that she could only take one book other than the bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.
“Can I take some Dostoyevsky books?” she asked. Kirsty reminded her that she could only take one. At that, Debbie decided she needed a book to keep her going so chose the infamous Russian tome that most people have not read and everyone says they will do one of these days.
So what other choices have people made?
Three people have chosen “Wuthering Heights”, dear darling Tony Benn took Das Kapital with him, five people have taken “Catch 22” (and an interesting lot they were) and Shami Chakrabarti decided to choose one of my favourites, “To Kill a Mocking Bird”.
In order to help me with my choice of reading, therefore, I can go to the website and start snooping around to see what people have read. For instance, having heard Deborah Harry discussing Dostoyevsky, I decided to look up how many people had chosen this particular author. When it then became apparent that nine people had chosen his books, seven of whom had chosen the same title, one of whom was Martin Sheen, I decided that perhaps I ought to read “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor.
And of course, where better to look for the aforementioned book in haste but to visit the Kindle bookshop on the Amazon website, whereupon I found a free copy of the book that I have now downloaded to my phone.
Isn’t life sometimes incredibly magical!
Of course, I think someone at the Beeb ought to compile these lists into some semblance of order. Perhaps with redundancy now in place, I ought to suggest myself for this task for I am sure that a compilation of books as a “Top Choices for the Island” would be a best seller – similar to the summary book that the BBC produced a few years ago, the 100 favourite books of the nation.
And here I come along to my final point of writing for the day, for it has turned well into Saturday now.
I adore listening to DID as those in the know call it. I am fascinated by the choices people make; sometimes horrified, sometimes moved to tears. The website is now calling members of the public to place their eight discs, luxury item and book on the site and one day soon I might get around to doing that, though I honestly don’t know where I would start to get a mere eight choices together, let alone choose one book.
And this made me think. Surely, it is time for Desert Island Discs to move a little with the times. As millions of people have Kindles now and that many books are at the tip of our fingers through internet downloads, then surely we should think about what could be taken on the island and what should be left behind.
I am not suggesting that Kirsty offers them an unlimited amount of Kindle downloads otherwise there would be no fun in listening to the castaway’s choices. However, I think the time has now come for them to consider giving each island dweller a loaded Kindle with 100 set texts. They could even use the 100 reads that the BBC produced a few years ago.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml
This would still enable the island dwellers to choose a book of their own, and it also might sort the men from mice in getting people to choose something different and not too predictable.
Also, if people desired, they could choose between this and the Bible perhaps or it could simply be an additional thing rather than an either/or. And whilst we are on the subject of the Bible, perhaps DID could be a little more flexible in the alternatives for this book. They offer the Koran when necessary but perhaps they could have a shortlist of other religious or philosophical books that castaways might like to take instead. How about, for example, a compilation of Confucius comments or Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching; neither of which, unbelievably, has made it onto the island. (I tell a lie. The pianist Lang Lang chose the Analects of Confucius last year – another piece of synchronicity as he was on the Andrew Marr show last Sunday!).
My only problem with all of this is that there are not enough hours in the day. I need to play the piano, to swim, to gym, to walk, to look up, to smell, to feel, to write, to eat, to do all the things that every human being should be doing daily; after their own individual needs and desires.
But I will try and read a little more and these two findings of mine are going to help me, and I hope they are going to help any reader of my blog also.
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