Sunday 28th January - Bell, Book and Kindle

There are no bells in this post. But the title was too good to resist.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/hereford-cathedral-chained-library

I am reading a number of books at the moment;

On Paper -

• Secret Life of Cows (Rosamund Young)
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• The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman) - just finished a day or so ago
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• Country Bunch (An Anthology collected by "Miss Read")

On Kindle -

• A Far Cry From Kensington (Muriel Spark)
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• Letters To A Young Poet (Rainer Maria Rilke)
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• Selected Poems (U A Fanthorpe)
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• Three Men In A Boat (Jerome K Jerome)
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• Flame and Shadow (Poems by Sarah Teasdale)
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• The Diet Myth - The Real Science Behind What We Eat (Tim Spector)
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• The Artist's Way (Julia Cameron)
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• Fierce Imaginings - The Great War (Rachel Mann)

Reading books, the printed-on-paper sort, is relatively straightforward. You pick up the book, find the page, and start reading. Except for the occasion where you are in one part of the house, and the book is somewhere else, so you have to go upstairs or downstairs to fetch it. Or, even worse, you are out and about somewhere, and you have left the book at home.

Reading Kindle books has advantages. If you have your device with you, then you have all your books as well, and it remembers where you have got to. I've downloaded most of the books in the Kindle list above onto most of my Kindle-reading devices. Great. O, wait, not ALL of my current books are downloaded on ALL of these devices, which are a paper-white Kindle (in the bedroom), my phone (in my handbag), and my android Lenovo Yogabook (downstairs or wherever I am working). Hey, not really a problem, provided I have wi-fi and battery-life and patience.

I also came a bit unstuck last night, when I clicked on the paperwhite Kindle and started to read. It took me a few minutes to work out which book I was reading! The page displayed had a couple of descriptive paragraphs; was this an anecdote from "The Artist's Way"? or scene-setting for "A Far Cry From Kensington"? or the beginning of yet another comic moment from "Three Men In A Boat?" At least I had no trouble discounting poetry, diet myths or "Letters To A Young Poet" from the possibilities. Finally, near the bottom of the page, the name of one of the characters, Wanda, appeared, and I knew where I was again (in Kensington). 

The phone and yogabook are a leetle bit smarter than the Kindle; so when I open the Kindle app, it shows me the cover of the book I last read, like this;

(screenshot from my phone)  

It sort of irritated me to begin with, when this new opening screen appeared after one of the updates. Now I am learning to be very grateful. 

The photograph at the top is of the Chained Library in Hereford Cathedral. We saw it several years ago when spent a week in that neck of the woods. Makes me even more grateful for my Kindle.