IT WAS "HILARIOUS"...!

It was “hilarious” they said...

No... No... Really, it wasn't…

I mean it was all right, and entertaining enough, but the funniest thing you’ll ever read…?

Please...

This is what I get for believing book reviews, but there you go. You really ought not to believe everything you read.

But, having made that evil leap across the great divide into the world of e-readers this year, I have found that I’ve been reading far fewer books than I used to. This may be down to the circumstances of this particularly difficult year where “free” time was precious and, due to the rearrangement of the interior spaces of our little abode, the stacks of unread physical books got put in the attic and jumbled up with the ones which had been read and so the “grab pile” became (and remains - for I am still a busy bee - or a lazy-arsed swine - depending upon point of view) less accessible than once it was...

Still, I did make the leap to e-readers as I said and now have a stack of unread digital files to add to those mountains of unread actual books and time continues to tick away far too quickly for my liking. 

At first I found it hard to adjust. In fact I think that I bought my first downloadable book just to see whether it worked... or maybe it was because it was a ridiculously cheap bargain price for something I had considered reading anyway.

It’s hard to remember now...

(I really MUST point you all in the direction of those articles on “Digital Dementia” that I’ve had pointed out to me... Now that IS scary reading...!)

Anyway, I found that the first read I tried in this format was very difficult. For some reason I found it hard to engage with the page in quite the same way as I do with an actual book, but, after a couple of days of fannying about and grumbling, I adjusted and was soon carried away by the plot as usual having, I think, got over the worries involved with getting to grips with the technique involved in reading on a device.

Perhaps you recognise the symptoms? Worrying about battery life, or tapping the page at the wrong moment, or hitting those invisible icons and finding yourself anywhere in the document and outside the story zone, or just shutting down the file for no very good reason.

Then again, perhaps it was just me. After all, all of you technophiles were probably already familiar with the techniques involved with touch-screen technology long before you tried reading on your device, and it’s people who come late to the party like myself who struggle to adapt.

But adapt I did and before long I had quite a virtual library building up, not least because it was far easier to deal with just one small device during all those hospital visits and picking up and half reading all of the paperbacks which are left in waiting rooms was beginning to become far too expensive when I had to track them down later in order to finish them.

And, after having adapted so utterly, that’s why I found myself reading those reviews one day as I found myself wondering quite what to read next and, stupidly, being persuaded that the book I had decided to consider, by a comedian whose performances I’d recently enjoyed on the radio, might be worth a punt, given that so many people were claiming that it was indeed the most “hilarious” thing that they had ever read.

As I said, really it wasn’t.