I never read mystery and detective stories and almost never suspense, never
Romance, never school fiction or young adult, almost never series. I read
fiction that emphasizes interpersonal relationships, contemporary fiction some
historical which often is contemporary as far as I'm concerned. I read
nonfiction books that I've hear about on podcasts or read about in articles and
some articles from The Nation and The New Yorker. I have been reading books all
of my life. My mother and my aunt read out loud to me. When I was in school, I
manipulated to spend most of my time in the sight conservation resource room
because I found the regular classroom time tedious. When I was in the regular
classroom, I had to sit in my seat, not talk to anyone, and write spelling
words over and over again. In the sight conservation classroom, I was free to
walk around, talk to other students, and choose any of the large print books in
the big cabinet to read. I read every one of those books. In my apartment
building, people left discarded books in the room where the garbage shoot was
located. I could read print books with a magnifying glass. I used to scavenge
those books and read them, everything from children's books to Lolita. After I
began working for IHB in 1962 and my left eye, the one with better vision,
began becoming more blurred and I was having more difficulty reading print,
Fred introduced me to talking books and taught me to read braille. It took
about 3 or 4 months to learn braille, although learning to read fast enough to
read a book, took a bit longer. I read braille books from 1963 until 2007 when
getting them up to the apartment where I'd moved in 2006, began to be a
problem, and I'd purchased a VR Stream and begun buying books from Audible. I
stopped getting books from Audible when my hearing became too impaired to
appreciate some of them and NLS was getting most of the same books anyway, and
almost as fast. That is changing now. NLS book quality appears to be
deteriorating and the acquisition is slowing down. But there is Bookshare if I
get desperate.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2021 10:19 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: My Admission
Well, I should join the BARD chat list just so I could aunload. We use BARD
for our relaxation listening. So it's mostly adventure fiction. Strong
language and descriptions of wild passionate sex is okay since my rule of thumb
is if the descriptive passage takes longer than the actual act, I exercise my
"Advance" finger. But I do resent having a gushy Harlequin Romance passed
along as Adventure Fiction.
However the one thing that really cranks my chain is when I download two or
qthree books in a series, by date, only to have BARD put them on my cartridge
alphabetically.
But overall I am well satisfied with BARD for entertainment. For other sorts
of reading, informational, political, etc., I have an overabundance of sources.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/23/21, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well, I'll use the Blind Democracy list to confess my sin of
intolerance rather than the BARD Talk list although I suppose it is
obvious to all those poor victims of my intolerance how intolerant I
am.
1. I am intolerant of people who complain about seeing large numbers
of foreign language books in the up to the minute category, but have
no problem going through large numbers of books written for elementary
school age children. All those people, like Nolan, go on and on about
how great America is but resent those foreign books, in particular,
the Spanish language books, especially those produced by NLS. And
people wonder why so many people voted for Trump?
And for folks who say that it's no problem to go quickly through
books you don't want to read, yes, you can go through foreign language
books fast, but not children's books. You usually have to read a bit
of the description before you know that the book is written for
children of elementary school age and you need to see the phrase
"young adult" before you know that it is probably written for
teenagers.
But now for my real sin: I get that there are many books in the young
adult category that were put there because they're about teenagers but
they might be written on an adult level. But truly, how many normally
functioning adults enjoy reading children's books, even if that
article that Bill posted said that it's OK if adults like them?
Actually, the article said that they help explain complicated concepts
to people who may have problems understanding them and they help
people who don't particularly like to read, learn to like to read. But
on the BARD Talk list, there are all these blind adults who enjoy
reading children's books! Sorry, but I think that's weird.
I wonder if all of them are congenitally totally blind. I know two or
three of them who said that they like these books, are. I wonder if
any of them have now, or have had vision in the past.
Miriam