Technology and Books

Yesterday, I felt like such a technoweenie*.

I turned on my Nook at lunch, as I usually do, only to find that it was not recognizing my micro SD card that I have for extra storage, which includes free books downloaded not from Barnes and Noble's site. After messing with it, it recognized the SD card but it said it needed to reformatted. What?! I messed with it again and then it was fine and that crisis was averted. But then I opened up Northanger Abbey to read and it came up blank. I couldn't turn the page either.

I thought the problem was still reading the SD card, so I tried to open Quitter, which I had purchased through Barnes and Noble. It came up blank too.

Now it was time to panic.

After Googling and combing through a Barnes and Noble Nook forum, I finally found a possible solution: restart it. Just press the power button down a little longer, until a message comes up about shutting it down.

And it worked.

Duh.

You always restart first.

Too bad it took me my whole lunch to figure it out.

And then the scanner was mean to me.

But today technology smiled upon me and I finished my book. Which ended rather anti-climatically and reminded me why I didn't actually like reading Pride and Prejudice that much even though I love the story and movie. Same sort of thing with Northanger Abbey (though I have not seen a movie adaptation yet, which was why I chose to read it): good story, and I did not mind the writing style at first. But over time it lacked proper interactions between the main character and her love interest that could have made the story actually feel like a believable romance story, and in the ending it was just very summed up and even more disappointing than the quick wrap-up in Mockinjay. At last there were a few sentences of emotion and dialogue in the latter. But this was published after Austen's death, so I wonder if she might would have edited it more otherwise.

Mansfield Park is next in My Complete Works of Jane Austen, and I have not seen a movie adaptation for that either. I might want to try something more... modern though. Suggestions are welcome.


*A term coined by one of my electronic media communication professors, meaning someone who does embrace technology and is generally inept of operating it. These folks still have dial-up Internet and haven't quite figured out texting.