My little low-tech e-reader

As we all know, e-readers are all the rage right now. E-books are flying off the virtual shelves, and according to reports, there is hardly a Christmas tree in the world right now without an e-reader under it. This is definitely the year e-books went mainstream. My library is lending out Kobos and even my murder mystery-loving landlady has a Sony Reader now. I resisted as long as I could but as a lover of both techie gadgets and books it was only a matter of time before I jumped on the bandwagon.

I resisted in part because I did not want to get trapped in a corporate walled-garden where I could only buy e-books from one particular store in one particular format. Not that I had any intention of paying to rent an e-book (one never really owns a commercial e-book), but devices like that tend to be unfriendly to public domain and library e-books. Yes, the various vendors offer bazillions of free e-books and you can download programs to convert public domain e-books into the appropriate format, but that’s just not good enough. The big name readers were out of the question.

Much to my surprise, I found that there are quite a lot of alternative e-readers out there. These are e-readers with no strings attached—no exclusive affiliation an e-book store, and better support for different formats. I won’t even try to name them because there is such a variety, and that is not even counting the alternative tablet and mini-tablet computers that can be used as e-readers. The powers that be would like us to think that we must choose between two or three megabrands, but that is not the case.

After much sleuthing and comparing features and reading reviews, I finally settled on a humble but able e-reader that does exactly what I want without making me work for it. I chose the Ectaco jetBook. Never heard of it? Neither had I until I went on a quest to find every available e-reader. The jetBook is more popular in Europe because of its multilingual ability. That is one of the main reasons I bought it. It can display a plethora of languages including right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. Since I am interested in learning languages that was important to me. No other e-reader supports as many languages as the jetBook; indeed I could not find any others that supported non-Latin alphabet languages, and I gather that many of them have trouble with anything other than English. Ectaco is a company that specializes in translation devices and software, so language support is naturally a priority for them.

The other main reason I chose the jetBook is its pragmatism. For starters, the hardware is generic. Aluratek also makes an e-reader using the same device but different firmware. For me the “design” or “style” of my e-reader is irrelevant, so if they can keep the price down by using an existing technology, that’s fine with me. The screen is a 5” reflective LCD, which means it does not have the annoying page-turn flash of e-ink readers and does not cause eye strain like the backlit tablets. The pages turn instantly, and I can read it outside without glare. The buttons, of which there are many since it is not a touch device, are crisp and intuitive. Just about anyone could start using it right out of the box without much trouble.

As for the firmware, the jetBook is incredibly flexible. It supports more e-book formats than any other e-reader, including Adobe DRM, which many libraries use. I especially like the fact that it can “reflow” PDF e-books, basically reading them as text files, though it does preserve tables and figures. Not all e-readers can handle PDFs that way (or any way, for that matter). As I mentioned before the jetBook can display many languages, and it also includes a few language dictionaries, but they can only be accessed while reading a txt file and are limited to common words. An advanced language learner would still need a conventional dictionary standing by, but that would be true of any other e-reader as well. The jetBook also supports mp3 audiobooks (or music), but it lumps all the files together in one menu so it’s not quite as slick as I might wish if it were my primary audiobook reader. As it is my Zune (with the help of Overdrive) does a great job of playing audiobooks so I don’t need the jetBook for that.

Managing books on the device could not be simpler. There is no software to install; one simply connects the jetBook to the computer and uses the computer’s file manager to move files around. The jetBook only has a small built-in memory but you can add an SD card of up to 16GB, which is enough for several lifetimes’ worth of books. On the SD card you can create as many folders and subfolders as you like, arranging and rearranging them in any way that suits you. I really like a device that does not tell me how to organize my files.

As you can see, simplicity and openness are the hallmarks of the jetBook. It lacks some of the bells and whistles of the big name e-readers, and costs a little more since it is not subsidized by e-book sales, but if you are looking for a device that does not put any obstacles between you and your e-books, this may be the e-reader for you. When I bought mine I was not even sure that I would get much use out of it. I do not travel or commute so when would I need such a thing? As it turns out, it has many uses even at home. I’ve used it to read e-books from the library, online PDF e-books and articles that I did not want to read on the computer, and public domain books that the library does not have or that are simply more convenient to load on the jetBook and keep for as long as I like. I still do most of my reading from paper books and audiobooks, but there are many cases where the jetBook is the best way to read something and then I am very glad to have it.

If you’d like to know more, check out the Ectaco website, and to see the jetBook in action watch the video tour below. Just note that you can get a better price than this reviewer did by buying directly from Ectaco.

The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin: Books

She talked a lot and willingly, and the most important thing he gathered from it all (and this raised him considerably in his own eyes) was that everything she said came from books; all her knowledge had been acquired by reading.

“As soon as you’re well you must get me books,” he insisted.

“Yes, indeed. I’m glad you want to read.”

“So am I.”

Mentally he added: Soon I’ll get to know as much as you do.

It was pleasant to realize that her superiority to him came only from books.

She kept saying over and over again that people must be taught, that then they would be come better and live like human beings. She told him about people who devoted their whole lives to trying to make others upright and to cultivate in them a respect for knowledge. And for this they were thrown into jail and exiled to Siberia.

—Maxim Gorky, The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin

The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin: First Lesson

“What is learning?”

The quietness with which the question was put made the boy’s heart contract with a foretaste of mystery, and be edged nearer to his teacher trustfully.

“Learning,” said the deacon, stroking his pupil’s hair, “is the means by which we acquaint our minds with events in the past, with life in the present, and with human dreams for the future. Learning, then, binds one man to another; in other words, it is a link connecting him with the world as a whole. Now let’s see what that means.

“What are words? Words are the body of the human mind, just as these bodies, yours and mine, are the vesture of the soul, no more and no less. Further: take a book, any book; it is written by a man who lived, let’s say, a hundred years ago and left for our edification all the treasure the man’s soul accumulated in the course of a lifetime. And so we might say: books contain the souls of people who lived before our day or are still living; a book is, as it were, a man’s account to the world at large of his deeds; it is the life record of a human soul. Is that clear?”

—Maxim Gorky, The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin

Obama’s Book Shop

“Powell's Books—A Hyde Park institution… Pres. Obama also used to shop here. The shop has a great selection of small press and academic remainder books. You can see the many shelves of books on books, photography, literature, history...”

Looks like my kind of place!

Photo by Andrew Wertheimer. Via Booklover

“The Whole Five Feet” by Christopher Beha

The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else
Christopher R. Beha
Grove Press
2009-05-06
256 pp.
9780802118844

The only reason I read this book is because I was assured that it actually took the great books seriously, unlike some other tome-conquering tales I’ve read. The author initially intended to write a comedy—“a feckless, somewhat lost young man who shuts himself away from the modern world … the young man might learn a few easy lessons, and we could all share some laughs along the way." However real life intruded—birth, death, and serious illness—to remind him that neither life nor books are to be taken lightly.

The lost young man part was more or less right. Not clear on what to do next, he moved back home to his parents’ luxurious New York apartment and decided to spend a year doing nothing other than read the Harvard Classics, a five-foot long set of books intended by its editor, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, “to provide the literary materials from which a careful and persistent reader might gain a fair view of the progress of man observing, recording, inventing, and imagining from the earliest historical times to the close of the nineteenth century.” You may notice right away that gorging on 22,000 pages of serious text in one year does not sound very “careful.” There were works, particularly in the poetry volumes, that Beha would have liked to linger over, but in the end he realized that he had the rest of his life to get better acquainted with the books and poems that spoke to him.

I was hardly done with some of these books when I knew that I would never return to them, whereas other will probably remain touchstones throughout my life. But again, it was the books themselves that taught me this. Before I read these two superficially similar books, I couldn’t have known that Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ would mean little to me while Pascal’s Pensées would mean so much. Many of my favourite works in the Classics, such as Dana’s Two Years before the Mast or Haskell’s letter from Gettysburg, had been entirely unfamiliar to me when I started. While reading these books, I needed to judge their worth for myself. But first I needed that outdated body—the clerisy, the intellectual elite—to tell me which books to read.

There is a definite sense of passing and loss in this book, and a desire to reclaim something for the future.

I wanted to establish a connection with those who came before me… I wanted to believe that for all the things lost, there might be abundant recompense somewhere.

Beha had personal reasons to read the Harvard Classics. His grandmother had had a set, and he was intrigued as to what a devoutly Catholic wife and mother with an 8th grade education would want with the great books. He also wondered how much of what she had absorbed from those books had filtered down through to family into himself. But of course reading the classics made them his own. He relates what he read to his own experiences of loss (including loss of faith) and illness, but he also feels the loss of the literary culture that the Harvard Classics (and the Great Books of the Western World) tried to popularize. He knows he cannot re-enter that culture without becoming an anachronism in his own time, but still he feels that we have lost something valuable and beautiful.

His poems, Wordsworth tells us, “were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.” He warns that readers who are used to the “gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers” may find his work strange or awkward: “they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title.”

It would surprise most readers now to hear Wordsworth’s description of his own language after reading about “that blessed mood, / In which the burthen of the mystery, / In which the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world, / Is lightened.” It’s not just the relative elegance of his supposed “awkwardness” that is so striking, but the complexity of this “language of conversation.”

One could be charitable and say that colloquial language evolves over time, and what seems conversational in one era is destined to sound strange more than a century later. But this won’t quite do. Wordsworth’s conversational language isn’t just different from ours; it’s richer and more beautiful. Simply put, something has been lost. When I came to this conclusion, I thought back to my grandfather. It seemed to me that our decline in self-expression rested somewhere in the fact that he had grown up memorizing lines from Longfellow whereas I had grown up memorizing lines from Caddyshack.

But what has been lost can be regained. Our predecessors were not born reciting poetry, they learned it by reading, which we can also do. We may lack the tweedy taskmasters of the past, but the task has never been easier. Culture has never been more accessible, even to elites, as it is now. Libraries and the Internet have made just about every significant work of art or thought available for little effort and expense. You can do the Grand Tour from your living room and read the classics for price of a library card. You can watch Shakespeare’s plays and listen to symphonies on YouTube. We don’t need a Harvard Classics any more, we only need people to remind us why we should keep reading (and watching and listening to and looking at) the classics.

In many ways, this is how I feel about having finished the Classics: I shall go on in the same way. Nothing in my life is going to change in any visible fashion. But these books have helped me to find meaning in events—illness and loss as well as moments of great joy—that didn’t make any sense to me. At the same time, life helped me make sense of these books. And so it will continue to go, for although I have read through the whole five feet, I’ll never be finished with them.

Thursday Tweets

A lot of good things appeared in my Twitter stream today and I thought I would share some of them here. First of all, two classics have been adapted into graphic novels, The Odyssey (via @rogueclassicist) and Don Quixote (via @batpoet). I suppose adventures stories lend themselves to a visual format, especially in the male-dominated graphic novel/comic book market. What are the chances we’ll see a graphic Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice?

The online book community is mourning the loss of Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg. He is said to have invented the ebook, and began by hand-typing classics such as Homer, Shakespeare, and the Bible into his computer and posting them online. Now the work is carried out by an army of volunteers all over the world using scanners and optical character recognition. However the human touch is still required, and you can help by joining Distributed Proofreaders. If you are the sort of person who notices the typos in today’s poorly edited books, you’re just the sort of person DP needs! There’s a nice community of book lovers there and it’s a great way to give back to the world of books.

Finally, have you ever noticed that some languages sound faster than others? Have you wondered if they are saying more or if there is just a lot of “filler” in the language? Well, according to some recent research [here’s the whole paper](via @StanCarey), it seems that the information density of a language is inversely proportional to the speed with which it is spoken, with the end result that languages (at least the ones that were tested) dish out roughly the same amount of information in the same amount of time. In other words, languages that sound faster don’t really say more than languages that sound slower. I don’t know if this research is conclusive or has been confirmed elsewhere, but it makes me wonder if the brain has an optimal speed for taking in verbal information, regardless of language. I do know one thing for sure: my brain is not fast enough to take in everything on Twitter!

E-book or E-scroll?

Here is a very interesting discussion of why the e-book is really a step backwards in reading technology. Readers (the human kind) do a lot more with books than just start on page one and read each page in sequence until they hit the back cover. The popularity of e-books and e-readers suggests that this is exactly what many people do with many books, but it won’t do for serious study (and enjoyment) of books. The codex is still the best reading technology we have.

In his “Confessions,” which dates from the end of the fourth century, St. Augustine famously hears a voice telling him to “pick up and read.” He interprets this as a command from God to pick up the Bible, open it at random and read the first passage he sees. He does so, the scales fall from his eyes and he becomes a Christian. Then he bookmarks the page. You could never do that with a scroll….

But so far the great e-book debate has barely touched on the most important feature that the codex introduced: the nonlinear reading that so impressed St. Augustine. If the fable of the scroll and codex has a moral, this is it. We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e-book.

The codex is built for nonlinear reading — not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel. Indeed, the codex isn’t just another format, it’s the one for which the novel is optimized. The contemporary novel’s dense, layered language took root and grew in the codex, and it demands the kind of navigation that only the codex provides. Imagine trying to negotiate the nested, echoing labyrinth of David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” if it were transcribed onto a scroll. It couldn’t be done.

God knows, there was great literature before there was the codex, and should it pass away, there will be great literature after it. But if we stop reading on paper, we should keep in mind what we’re sacrificing: that nonlinear experience, which is unique to the codex. You don’t get it from any other medium — not movies, or TV, or music or video games. The codex won out over the scroll because it did what good technologies are supposed to do: It gave readers a power they never had before, power over the flow of their own reading experience. And until I hear God personally say to me, “Boot up and read,” I won’t be giving it up.

—Lev Grossman, From Scroll to Screen

via The Iconic Books Blog

Umberto Eco: Murmuring Books

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

—Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

via Booklover

Jorge Luis Borges: Paradise

via book lovers never go to bed alone

MegaReader

Isn’t part of the point of reading to make the world go away? :D

 

via The Well-Read Man

Canterbury Tales: A Clerk from Oxford

A clerk from Oxford was with us also,
Who'd turned to getting knowledge, long ago.
As meagre was his horse as is a rake,
Nor he himself too fat, I'll undertake,
But he looked hollow and went soberly.
Right threadbare was his overcoat; for he
Had got him yet no churchly benefice,
Nor was so worldly as to gain office.
For he would rather have at his bed's head
Some twenty books, all bound in black and red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy
Than rich robes, fiddle, or gay psaltery.
Yet, and for all he was philosopher,
He had but little gold within his coffer;
But all that he might borrow from a friend
On books and learning he would swiftly spend,
And then he'd pray right busily for the souls
Of those who gave him wherewithal for schools.
Of study took he utmost care and heed.
Not one word spoke he more than was his need;
And that was said in fullest reverence
And short and quick and full of high good sense.
Pregnant of moral virtue was his speech;
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach.

—Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Prologue (287-310)

Polyglot: The Forbearance of Books

A book can be pocketed and discarded, scrawled and torn into pages, lost and bought again. It can be dragged out from a suitcase, opened in front of you when having a snack, revived at the moment of waking, and skimmed through once again before falling asleep. It needs no notice by phone if you can’t attend the appointment fixed in the timetable. It won’t get mad if awakened from its slumber during your sleepless nights. Its message can be swallowed whole or chewed into tiny pieces. Its content lures you for intellectual adventures and it satisfies your spirit of adventure. You can get bored of it—but it won’t ever get bored of you.

—Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages [Download PDF]

Bookshelf: Sunset

I love this sunset-coloured bookshelf from RS Barcelona (click for more photos). Each metal shelf is made of two parts that slide over each other and out the sides of the bookshelf, so you can arrange and rearrange your books and knick knacks however you like. It’s perfect for the ever-expanding library!

I’m working on expanding my shelving right now, and this bookshelf makes me wonder if I shouldn’t depart from my usual light wood stain and instead use some wild colours. Rainbow colours always look good, as do gradations of the same hue. Does anyone out there have coloured bookshelves? How do you like them?

via Bookshelf

Library Girl

I spotted this lovely song by Reina del Cid (great name, eh?) at Your Move, Dickens. As a former library girl I can relate!

Martial: Books and Hooks

Quod tibi Decembri mense, quo uolant mappae
gracilesque ligulae cereique chartaeque
et acuta senibus testa cum Damascenis,
praeter libellos uernulas nihil misi,
fortasse auarus uidear aut inhumanus.
Odi dolosas munerum et malas artes;
imitantur hamos dona: namque quis nescit
auidum uorata decipi scarum musca?
Quotiens amico diuiti nihil donat,
o Quintiane, liberalis est pauper.

Because in December's month, when napkins fly
about, and slender spoons, and wax tapers, and paper,
and pointed jars of dried damsons, I have sent you
nothing but my home-bred little books, perhaps I
may seem stingy or impolite. I abhor the crafty and
cursed trickery of presents; gifts are like hooks;
for who does not know that the greedy sea-bream is
deceived by the fly he has gorged  Every time he
gives nothing to a rich friend, O Quintianus, a poor
man is generous.

—Marcus Valerius Martialis (Martial), Epigrams V:xviii (from A Christmas Celebration)

Bed and a Book… or Two… Hundred

I think this is what my bedroom will look like eventually. Not too safe in an earthquake zone but what a way to go!

[Photo source unknown]

I don’t mean to be rude but…

via Booklover

Rory Gilmore, Bookworm

I don’t know why the Gilmore Girls never caught on with me. I think they talk too fast for me. A recent article in Psychology Today suggests that introverts give other people’s words so much thought that we get bogged down when they keep on talking and don’t give us time to think (hence our aversion to chatterboxes). So much the worse when they machine gun a continuous stream of one-liners as the Gilmores do. However it seems there is a bookish element to the show, which I wasn’t aware of. Perhaps the show deserves another look.

via Dewey’s Read-a-Thon

Sor Juana: The Sheer Love of Learning

I went on with the studious pursuit (in which I found relaxation during all the free time remaining from my obligations) of reading and more reading, study and more study, with no other teacher than books themselves. On can readily imagine how hard it is to study from those lifeless letters, lacking a teacher’s live voice and explanations. Still I happily put up with all those drawbacks, for the sheer love of learning. Oh, if it had only been for the love of God, which would have been the sound way, what merit would have been mine! I will say that I tried to uplift my study as much as I could and direct it to serving Him, since the goal I aspired to was the study of theology, it seeming to me a mean sort of ineptitude for a Catholic not to know all that can be found out in this life trough natural means concerning divine mysteries. I also felt that being a nun and not a lay person, I should, because of my ecclesiastical status, make a profession of letters—and furthermore that, as a daughter of Saint Jerome and Saint Paula, it would be a great disservice for the daughter of such learned parents to be a fool. This is what I took upon myself, and it seemed right to do so, unless of course—and this is probably the case—it was simply a way of flattering and applauding my own natural tendency, proposing its own pleasure to it as an obligation.

In this way I went on, continually directing the course of my study, as I have said, toward the eminence of sacred theology. To reach this goal, I considered it necessary to ascend the steps of the human arts and sciences, for how can one who has not mastered the style of the ancillary branches of learning hope to understand the general and specific methodologies of which Holy Scripture is composed? How, without rhetoric, could I understand its figures, tropes, and locutions How, without physics, all the natural questions concerning the nature of sacrificial animals, which symbolize so many things already explicated, and so many others? How, whether Saul’s being cured by the sound of David’s harp came about by virtue of the natural power of music, or through supernatural powers which God was pleased to bestow on David? How, lacking arithmetic, could one understand such mysterious computations of years, days, months, hours, weeks, as those of Daniel and others, for the intelligence of which one needs to know the natures, concordances, and properties of numbers? How, without geometry, could one measure the sacred ark of the covenant and the holy city of Jerusalem, whose mysterious measurements form a cube in all its dimensions, and the marvellous proportional distribution of all its parts? How, without a knowledge of architecture, is one to understand Solomon’s great temple, of which God Himself was the artificer who provided the arrangement and layout, the wise king being only the overseer who carried it out? In it, no column’s base was without its mystery, no column without its symbolic sense, no cornice without allusiveness, and so on with all its parts, not even the most miniscule fillet serving solely to support or complement to the design of the whole, but rather itself symbolizing greater things. How will one understand the historical books without a full knowledge of the principles and divisions of which history consists? Those recapitulations in the narrative which postpone what actually occurred first? How will one understand the legal books without a complete acquaintance with both codes of law? How without a great deal of erudition, all the matters of secular history mentioned in Holy Writ, all the customs of the gentiles, the rites, the ways of speaking? How, without many rules and much reading of the Church Fathers, will one be able to understand the prophets’ obscure forms of expression? And how, unless one is thoroughly versed in music, will one understand those musical proportions, with all their finer points, found in so many passages, especially in Abraham’s petitions to God for the cities, asking whether He would forgive them, providing there were fifty righteous men, from which the number went down to forty-five, which is the sesquioctave and as from re to mi; thence to thirty, which is the sesquitierce, or the proportion of the diatessaron; thence to twenty, which is the sesquialter, or that of the diapente; thence to ten, which is the duple, or diapason—and went no further, there being no other harmonic proportions. Now, how is this to be understood without music?

—Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz, In Reply to Sor Philothea

My own justification for spending most of my time in pursuit of knowledge sounds similar to this, but I’m not sure I believe it any more than I believe the sassy Sor Juana. These paragraphs are part of long, sarcastic, allusion-encrusted letter to “Sor Philothea,” a Bishop who publicly admonished her for writing poetry and studying, improper activities for a female, in “her” opinion. Sor Juana’s own sense of the relevance of gender in intellectual matters is stated pretty clearly in her poem to a gentleman of Peru who suggested she should become a man if she wants to write:

with one thought I came to this spot:
to be rid of those who’d inquire
whether I am a woman or not.

In Latin it’s just of the married
that uxor, or woman, is said.
A virgin has no sex at all—
or indeed she has both, being unwed.

So the man who looks upon me
as a woman, shows want of respect,
since one embracing my state
is foreclosed to the other sex.

Of one thing I’m sure: that my body
disinclined to this man or that,
serves only to house the soul—
you might call it neuter or abstract.

You go… um… person!

2666: You have to read books

Then he dictated recipes for Endive and Shrimp Salad and Broccoli Salad and then he said that man couldn’t live on healthy food alone. You have to read books, he said. Not watch so much TV. The experts say TV doesn’t hurt the eyes. I’m not so sure. It won’t do your eyes any good, and cell phones are still a mystery. Maybe they cause cancer, as some scientists say. I’m not saying they do or they don’t, but there you have it. What I’m saying is you have to read books. The preacher knows I’m telling you the truth. Read books by black writers. But don’t stop there. This is my real contribution tonight. Reading is never a waste of time. I read in jail. That’s where I started to read. I read a lot. I went through books like they were barbecue. In prison they turn the lights out early You get in bed and hear sounds. Footsteps. People yelling. as if instead of being in California, the prison was inside the planet Mercury, the planet closest to the sun. You feel cold and hot at the same time and that’s a clear sign you’re lonely or sick. You try to think about other things, sure, nice things, but sometimes you just can’t do it. Sometimes a guard at the nearest desk turns on a lamp and light from that lamp shines through the bars of your cell. This happened to me any number of times. The light from a lamp set in the wrong place, or from the fluorescent bulbs in the corridor above or the next corridor over. Then I would pick up my book and hold it in the light and get to reading It wasn’t easy because the letters and the paragraphs seemed frenzied or spooked in that unpredictable, underground world. But I read and read anyway, sometimes so fast that even I was surprised, and sometimes very slowly, as if each sentence or word were something good for my whole body not just my brain And I could read like that for hours, not caring whether I was tired and not dwelling on the inarguable fact that I was in prison because I had stood up for my brothers, most of whom couldn’t care less whether I rotted or not. I knew I was doing something useful. That was all that counted. I was doing something useful as the guards marched back and forth or greeted each other at the change of shift with friendly words that sounded like obscenities to my ear and that, thinking about it now, might actually have been obscene. I was doing something useful. Something useful no matter how you look at it. Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach. And you, who are so kind, now you must be asking: what did you read, Barry? I read everything. But I especially remember a certain book I read at one of the most desperate moments of my life and it brought me peace again. What book do I mean? What book do I mean? Well, it was a book called An Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire, and I promise you that is one useful book, or at least it was of great use to me.

—Roberto Bolaño, 2666