Bookshelves and saving trees...

I often put whatever book I'm reading on a shelf in our downstairs bathroom. When we had company recently, he came out of that little room hysterically laughing. This is the photo that caught his eye and produced the laughter. I will leave it to the reader to see the humor in the two dominant titles.

I suppose one way of looking at it would be to imagine the wife is praying for "tight lines" for her fisherman husband. Not found within the covers of Stormie O'Martian's book is the following "Fisherman's Prayer" borrowed from a site called "Positive Thoughts".

"I pray that I may live to fish,

Until my dying day.
And when it comes to my last cast,
I then most humbly pray:
When in the Lord's great landing net
And peacefully asleep
That in His mercy I be judged
Big enough to keep."

There are several other possibilities that could be attributed to the photograph, but the truth is that when the oversize book on fly-tying arrived, Joe put it in one of the few places that wasn't piled high with papers, etc. (Not that funny, but it gave our guest a chuckle and provided me with a few blogger lines.)

While on the subject of bookshelves, ours are soon to join the ranks of the dynasaur. For Christmas I got an amazon.com Kindle. WOW! I love, love, love it. When we cruise, I would use half of a small suitcase to pack enough reading material to last the two weeks. They have libraries on all cruise ships, but I'm always afraid I won't finish the "loaner" before we dock. When we are on vacation I like to do what I call "fluff" reading. I got my degree in Literature & Writing, but I don't take the classics on a cruise. I read a lot of serial books. Among my favorite authors is Debbie Macomber. I started out reading her Blossom Street series because I love to knit and crochet and the stories not only followed the lives of the shop owners on the little street in Washington, they had patterns included. I moved from that group to "The Cedar Cove" series. These books are kind of like soap operas in print. The characters' lives intertwine in convoluted ways, but they are quick reads and thus the need for half a suitcase.

Then, on our cruise to the Black Sea last year, we met a couple from Georgia who are now part of our email address book and "facebook friends". Joe met the husband while we were checking in at the port in Italy. Joe was wearing a golf shirt that had his Navy wings embroidered on it. That sparked an inquiry by Paul, the husband, and soon we found out that not only did he and Joe have Naval aviation in common, he and I had a Delta connection. He is a retired Delta captain and in his early days as a first officer we had worked on the same flights from Atlanta to Los Angeles! (Cruising re-emphasizes how small a world this is.) Back to topic...Paul's wife, Milene, introduced me to the Kindle. It is the same size as a paperback book, but much thinner. It not only holds thousands of titles, but you can increase the type size for even easier reading. To turn the page, you just give a push on the "next page" button on either side of the e-reader. And, the screen is glare-free so you can read even on deck!

I sound like an ad for amazon.com. That's not the purpose, I promise. I know folks who have a leading competitor's newest product that is about the same size (no names), but if you love to read and you want an affordable e-reader, the Kindle is great. Best of all, if I finish a book and I want to read another, I just turn on the wireless connection, browse a little and within seconds I have a new novel. As of today, there are 630,000 titles to choose from. Among those, there are literally hundreds of books that are either free or nearly so ($.25 or $.50). Often a new author will offer a free e-book to build a fan base; you love it and then you pay for the next offering. E-books are always less expensive than the paper version. (I like to think I'm saving at least a portion of an endangered forest.)

I downloaded the Holy Bible before a bible-study class and it was in my Kindle in less than 30 seconds. Having visited the Huntington Library in Pasadena and seeing the painstaking work that went into the original, I can only wonder what Gutenberg would think?

More soon...I've decided that when it comes to blogging, less is more if you haven't got something worth writing. (That's a good rule to end with.)