The Emerald Rose

Both my wife and I love to read, and I still have my Boston Library Card which I’ve had for well over 60 years, even though I live in Florida!
However despite my love of reading, those articles, columns, and “stuff” the internet offers, including “white Papers”, and other GREAT mind fertilizer,….well it’s almost an overkill.
Years ago you needed to either go to, or request information from “the “real” stacks”. It always conjured up a vision of little “Library Trolls” living in a dingy, dark, dusty, mildewed cellar like environment, who would scurry around and knew exactly where to find the requested book or text you asked the “real” Librarian to have retrieved. And I always believed in supporting the little Trolls, (they probably had families to support aas well). Plus those little critters were literally “faster than a speeding bullet.” Point being that you had to “wait”, albeit not long to get your hands on the desired book or text, while the Troll searched for it.
But today I am blown away at how fast I can translate a thought and a few key strokes into reality with the internet and the plethora of services available.
(Sorry Trolls,….you guys got to be getting near retirement anyway, …and no doubt you told your “little trolls” to go into IT and make a million setting up database search parameters for dating serices,and don’t hang out in “the stacks” and waste their lives like you thought you did. (Not true,…but that’s only one man’s opinion.)
Anyway, the internet and the “electronic readers”, now mean I don’t even have to go to the bookstore, (except to languish and enjoy the ‘smell’ of books like in the library). Now I just punch up something on my iPad, my iPhone, or my desktopp and I’m there. Brad Thor just released a book today,…TODAY, and I already have it, same thing with Danial Silva, (another author I enjoy reading), now they are on my “to be read” shelf in my electronic reader…)
So as the title says, my “To be read” shelf is growing, as I am on book two of a trilogy called “The Irish Endgames” (not Hemingway, but a decent premise and ‘passable’writing, as well as causing one to think a bit more than whatever is on TV tonight?)
Anyway the internet is working BIG-TIME for ‘the reader’ we get everyting almost instantly and now we face the age old problem of an addicted reader,…..”too many books, not enoough time to read them all,…..unless I retire and decide to become “one with the recliner”.
Sure hope more people agree reading today is far better and easier than it used too be,…but libraries don’t get used anymore so it’s hard to tell! (Sure hope the Trolls got Social Security and Medicare,…..they really contributed to this world for years.
-30-