Today, Wade, my fellow short story writer and computer guru, helped me figure out the Nook. By the end of our meeting, I was able to download a book from the Gutenberg Project (gutenberg.org), free e-books available to download, most of them classics.
I downloaded Henry David Thoreau's Walden. A month ago, I picked up a hard cover edition at the Muehl Public Library's book fair, and I still have my well thumbed paperback, so that's three Waldens, and each one has this paragraph about living truly:
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to route all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world."
The words are the same in paperback, hardcover or e-book. It is the words that tell us how to go about living. The words are important, not the delivery system.
Wade also helped me download an e-book mystery from the Outagamie-Waupaca Library System, and of course, there's Barnes and Noble and that's more books. I can collect hundreds of them. I can be a packrat yet have all my acquisitions in one slim easy to dust Nook.
Three sources for literature, never ending reading. Marvelous.
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