This is a post about me succumbing to peer pressure in two ways at once.For all my love of digital media--getting used to online-only course material, loving open-access journals, PDF articles, and all that--I had never read an ebook until this weekend. I'm not one of those staunch devotees of hardcopy print, though I do like the feel of actual books, the ability to scribble in the margins, and, yes, the smell. I just never got around to it. But with all the hype surrounding the Hunger Games movie coming out, and the fact that my mother has loved the books for years, and my student employees and friends were all raving about them, I figured I'd better have a read. At the very least because I fear irrelevance. I knew there'd be no way of checking out a copy from a library anywhere (San Diego County has over 300 in circulation, and surely they have holds lined up until the next Quarter Quell...harhar what I did there), so I decided I might as well venture into the world of ebooks and see how I like it.
Even though I know Amazon is supposed to be the bane of every library and librarian's existence, I knew I cold easily download the Kindle app for my iPad and be reading in five minutes. So that's what I did. Sure, sure, I could have done a bit more research, but I'm a slave to Zipf's Law.
Later, my boyfriend showed me this sweet deal where you can get all three books for about $3, so I downloaded Kobo (which is pretty much just as good as Kindle... maybe more "social") and got my read on.
I started Hunger Games on Thursday night and finished on Saturday night. I started Catching Fire on Sunday morning and finished on Sunday night. Woe is me, spring quarter starts today, so who knows when I'll finish Mockingjay. Hopefully sometime this week.
But you guys. I'm obsessed. It definitely lives up to the hype. Though I'm hesitant to see the movie, since, as everyone knows, the book is always better than the movie. I'll probably see it anyway. And reading an ebook wasn't so bad after all. I did end up tethered to the wall during my Sunday read-athon, but it was OK. I could even highight. I'm not about to abandon all print, but I'm far less skeptical now. This is the future, you know.
I also want to write a bit more about the book, and all the interesting themes going on there, but it will have to wait, since this post is already too long and I have yet to even look at my new course websites for the new quarter. Blerg.
