The new book

I love to read. Reading has been my education. All my life I have read books and collected books. I have hauled tons of books (I'm sure its been tons) as I've moved from place to place. I have haunted book stores. The titles that wouldn't sell, the remaindered books on the tables in front of the store, I've bought so many of them.

Now that I work less or don't have to work I'm reading even more. Up until the last decade or so I could take enough books when I traveled to keep me reading until I was home again. Not any more. The friendly skies have turned greedy and every pound beyond the essentials must be paid for. Also, every pound of baggage has to be pulled and pushed and now rolled on tiny little brittle plastic wheels thru the hells called terminals.

Modern electronics to the rescue. The flash memory is the star of semiconductors. It has gone beyond the wildest expectations anyone had for it thirty years ago when it was first introduced. Together with the microcomputer it has enabled something called the "Ebook". The "book" will never die but it will no longer be ink on paper. The ebook pictured cost me about $100 a month ago. I got it from J&R in NYC and I love it. There are tens of thousands of books available on the web for free so content is not a problem. It takes the same 2 Gig SD flash sticks my FujiFilm camera uses. Same batteries too, rechargeable AA NiMh (two sets of 4). Text is loaded into it simply as files transferred to a (virtual) hard drive.

Hundreds of five pound novels can be stored on one SD flash drive. These SDs are $6 each. So I'll truly have a half ton of books (or more) when I fly. A black day for the English language book stores frequented by tourists and expats the world over.

So what is loaded now? Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game and The Shadow of the Wind (in Spanish and English). Alexander Solzhenitsyn - the First Circle. The complete works of Vladimir Nabokov. The complete works of Raymond Chandler. The complete works of John Cheever. Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths. Hesse - Magister Ludi. Kafka - The Castle. Mann - Doctor Faustus. Marquez - In Evil Hour and Memories of my melancholy Putas. Saramago - Seeing.

Thats just some of the stuff I have recently loaded into it. I've already gone thru everything P.K.Dick ever published and a ton of Science Fiction from the pulps of the 50's, stuff I was weaned on - the reading that hooked me for life.

Bringing the theme full circle, when I am waiting in the terminals on my way to and from Ecuador, I'll not be bored. In line or on plastic seating I will be with Solzhenitsyn in a Soviet prison camp or following Carlos Zafon thu the streets of Barcelona.