I haven’t had such a horrible reading experience since I think about 1998 or 1999. I had forgotten that it was like trying to wrestle an octopus in the dark. It’s better when you have light, lots of light. The worst part is not so much trying to see the blurry, small print on cheap paper as it is trying to keep the page from curving and the whole thing closing and slipping out of your hands–hands because the unpleasant process takes two hands to make it viable. And your arms get tired and maybe cold if you don’t have the heat turned up sufficiently.

Of course there’s always the problem of losing your place when you set the bloody thing down for a minute. Or it can close on you unexpectedly when you’re not paying attention. Forget bookmarks. They fall out, and you have to spend a half hour figuring out where you left off.

If the damn thing is borrowed from a friend or a library, you can’t make annotations, highlight or draw in it for it would be a cardinal sin. And what if you want to copy a passage and paste it in another document? Fergetaboutit.

I have to say I enjoyed the story for it was well crafted and kept me turning the pages, which is another bother that takes some dexterity. Turning pages is like eating potato chips–it’s difficult to do just one. Most of the time the pages stuck together, and it was not easy to turn just one, which of course slows down the process and contributes to the unpleasantness of it all. Read the rest of this entry »