Throwing Down the Gauntlet

I’m in for it now. You may have already met Cujo. I changed his name. Because he asked me to.      Koko the E-reader didn’t make him feel tough enough, you know? So he’s Cujo. But lest he think himself bigger and badder than he should be, I’m buying him a pink cover.

The pink cover isn’t the problem. The little light that may or may not come with said pink cover is not the problem, although if it arrives without the light, I’ll be annoyed. The problem is with the device itself.

He still works great, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been reading for hours a day for the last many days, and he’s still half-charged. The battery isn’t the problem. Nor are the buttons that actually explain what they are for when I push them. I’ve been far less frustrated with this reader than I ever was with the Kindle Fire. The problem is what Cujo contains. Books. Lots and lots of books.

Manufacturers seem to think that a great selling point for their gadgets is the books that they have preloaded onto them for free. FOR FREE, mind. Never mind that the very same titles are also available at the Gutenberg Project, and there they are also…wait for it…free. So these little beggars come loaded to the gills*** with books.  Mine came with 103 titles, and thanks to Gutenberg and my good friend, sj, I’ve added about 10 15 more.

Every single title has one little word at the end, haunting me, taunting me, challenging me. One tiny little word. Unread.

100+ awesome books, we’re talking classics, and none of them have even been looked at. I don’t know if the person who owned the device before me was a complete and total slacker, or if the used bookstore simply returned the reader to factory specs before they put it on the sale floor, but it’s the saddest thing I have ever seen. All those books failing to fulfill their literary destiny. Know what’s even sadder? I haven’t read them, either. Not most of them.

I’m going to fix that. Over the next couple of years, I am going to read my way through all of the books that are on my e-reader. Even the ones I’ve added myself. Even the ones my friends have sent me as gifts that I might not have picked up otherwise.  I’m allotting a couple of years here because I don’t plan to give up the rest of my life. Sometime in the next six months, my name will come up at the library for Jim Butcher’s latest, and I will have to take a cruise through the Harry Potter series again. And let’s not forget about Lord of the Rings. Plus I’m doing some writing of my own. But I will read these suckers. All in good time.

At the end of this challenge, I know that I will find myself enriched beyond belief, and maybe chock full of vitamins and minerals. Kind of like a breakfast cereal. I’ll be a better person, a wiser person. An older person with iffy eyes. At least one of the above.

So who’s with me? Anybody else want to tackle a daunting to-be-read list? Let’s conquer this mountain of books together!

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*** This is a figure of speech and in no way implies that e-readers and other electronic devices have gills or are otherwise suited to aquatic life. They are not and object vociferously to swimming lessons.

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