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M. Kei

What have you read in 2010? Post your list here and update it as you go along! (One thread per member, please.)
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kujakupoet
Scribbler
Posts: 6
Joined: January 2011
Location: Chesapeake Bay, USA
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M. Kei

Post by kujakupoet » Sun January 16th, 2011, 7:10 pm

2010 Reading

Because of a neurological disorder, I'm a very slow reader. However, last fan a fan gave me a Kindle which will read aloud if the publisher has enabled text to speech, so I can get through a book in 3 - 4 weeks now.

Mr. Midshipman Easy, by Capt. Frederick Marryat
Frank Mildmay, Or, the Naval Officer, by Capt. Frederick Marryat
False Colors, by Alex Beecroft

I listened to all these books on the Kindle:

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
Candide, by Voltaire
Peter Simple, by Capt. Frederick Marryat
Captain Blood, by Rafael Sabatini
The Middy and the Moor, by R. M. Ballantyne
My First Voyage to the Southern Seas, by Kingston
Beloved Pilgrim, by Nan Hawthorne
The Involuntary King, by Nan Hawthorne
Captain's Surrender, by Alex Beecroft

Pirates of the Narrow Seas 1 : The Sallee Rovers, by M. Kei
Pirates of the Narrow Seas 2 : Men of Honor, by M. Kei
Pirates of the Narrow Seas 3 : Iron Men, by M. Kei

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Margaret
Bibliomaniac
Posts: 2440
Joined: August 2008
Interest in HF: I can't answer this in 100 characters. Sorry.
Favourite HF book: Checkmate, the final novel in the Lymond series
Preferred HF: Literary novels. Late medieval and Renaissance.
Location: Catskill, New York, USA
Contact:

Post by Margaret » Sun January 16th, 2011, 9:13 pm

Cool! Did you notice any difference in your experience of a novel when you were able to finish one so much faster?
Browse over 5000 historical novel listings (probably well over 5000 by now, but I haven't re-counted lately) and over 700 reviews at www.HistoricalNovels.info

kujakupoet
Scribbler
Posts: 6
Joined: January 2011
Location: Chesapeake Bay, USA
Contact:

Kindle makes reading better for disabilities

Post by kujakupoet » Sun January 23rd, 2011, 1:48 pm

[quote=""Margaret""]Cool! Did you notice any difference in your experience of a novel when you were able to finish one so much faster?[/quote]

Absolutely. I can now remember what's going on much better. If it takes you six months to read, the details of the novel are pretty damn fuzzy by the time you finish and only a few scenes or characters stick with you. To be able to read it in a short period means I have a much better idea of what's going on. I still lose a lot, but novels make a lot more sense now.

The quality of the writing matters. Disability meant that only really good writers on subjects that interested me could motivate me to put the massive effort into reading. Now I can enjoy a lot of different writers. Maybe they're not great fiction, but they're entertaining. I can read for fun and not feel I'm 'wasting' what little brain capacity I had. Before I had to be incredibly picky about what I read because I was going to be spending most of a year with it.

Reading a printed book was not relaxing. It was work. Huge, unpleasant, difficult work. I have much more sympathy for people with reading disabilities now. It used to be so easy for me to read I never understood why people had trouble with it or would dislike it. If I had grown up like this, I wouldn't like reading either. It's because I remember the pleasure of reading that I keep trying to read -- I want that pleasure back! If you've never had it, you'd have no idea what you were missing.

It's also easy to take with me. It fits into a pocket of my cargo pants, so all the time I spend sitting in doctor's offices I now spend reading. I have the case with it and use headphones, so on the ship I can turn into my bunk and read or listen. I go back and forth between listening and reading. When my brain gets tired of one mode of input, I switch to the other.

I'm mostly reading free books right now because these classic and old books have text to speech enabled. Books you have to pay for usually discriminate against people with disabilities by refusing to enable text to speech. That makes no sense to me. Why narrow your audience? 19% of Americans have a disability, and that doesn't even count the many more than wear glasses or contacts and might prefer to listen than read, or the people that might like to listen while driving or working out. Text to speech won't take people away from audio books -- audio books are a kind of performance art that's different from mechanical text to speech. If anything it might make them start to think that audio books are worth the money.

~K~
--
M. Kei
Pirates of the Narrow Seas (gay fiction)
Slow Motion : The Log of a Chesapeake Bay Skipjack (poetry)
http://NarrowSeas.blogspot.com

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