Bibielz’ new device (a post with a PHOTO! 😀 ).

It feels like lately, the market of book players for the blind has been revived, if only for a brief moment. A lot of people predicted that they would soon become completely obsolete, taking into account the fact that now, a lot of blind people use their iPhones to access books and other media, which pays off more since you pay for one device that can perform the functions of several assistive devices, rather than pay double the money you’d pay for an iPhone just for a book player with some extra features. And it is quite visible that book players are becoming the domain of the elderly who have just lost their sight recently, or possibly students who need a more granular navigation inside their books than what popular reading apps can offer. Since I have very specific and perhaps a bit eccentric reading habits, about which I wrote more for example in this post, the switch to iPhone for reading books never really worked out for me, despite several attempts at ditching or at least limiting the use of my faithful PlexTalk Linio Pocket. Which I was ever so slightly worried about, because while my PlexTalk still works fine overall (perhaps except for a bit broken charger), its manufacturer appears to have ditched it a few years ago in that it no longer receives any firmware updates, and a lot of its features no longer work in practice, such as Audible which I describe in the post linked above. So I was kind of wondering what I’ll do when my current PlexTalk dies. It’s not like it, or other book players, are no longer available to buy, but it felt like maybe I should just keep trying to get used to Voice Dream Reader on iPhone rather than pay for some way over-priced device which doesn’t really offer anything ground-breaking for our current standards and isn’t even going to get updated. However, this year, I’ve already heard of like four or five different new book player devices coming out, which gave me some renewed hope. It looks like manufacturers of assistive devices are still willing to try and create products that can compete with a smartphone, or perhaps complement it in some meaningful way. So I slowly started to think that perhaps now is the time to get myself something new to replace the PlexTalk, given that the options have expanded so much this year, and a few felt actually worth considering for me.

 

The final straw that made me make up my mind was when Sofi’s computer (the desktop one that I had before I got the Mac that I had never-ending troubles with) broke. It didn’t break irreparably, but this event seemed to make Sofi realise that, actually, now that she’s in high school, she doesn’t really need a computer, let alone such a huge one. She did need a computer for some schoolwork in the past, but now it no longer is required, and she does almost all her personal stuff on the phone. This turned out to be a bit of a problem for me though, because I still used Sofi’s computer for my criminal activity of stripping DRM from Audible books so that I could read them the way I like – on the PlexTalk, of course. It doesn’t seem like there’s any software for the Mac accessible with VoiceOver that can convert Audible. This presented me with a dilemma: either I have to get a Windows virtual machine on my Mac, or buy some cheap laptop just to do all the things that are easier to do on Windows, or buy a book player that still supports Audible, i.e. its “enhanced” format, or just say goodbye to Audible and look for English-language audiobooks elsewhere/just be satisfied with ebooks. – I guess the first option would be the easiest, but since I was already thinking about possibly switching to a new book player, I decided to look more closely into the third option, feeling grateful for such a sudden influx of book players. 😀 Initially though it seemed really depressing because looking at their specs, it didn’t seem like any of them supported Audible! I didn’t even want to believe that, because a few of them had done it in their previous models, when Audible’s old format was still a thing. Surely they’d be able to figure something out with Amazon to accommodate Audible’s new format as well. I reached out to two companies whose devices seemed the most interesting to me except for their lack of Audible, and, sure enough, it turned out that one of them will receive support for Audible in a future firmware version, although it would be implemented in a rather unexpected way because the device actually runs on Android and instead of having native support for it, you will actually have to download the Audible app like you would on a phone. As it turned out, this was the device that I considered more interesting out of the two – SensePlayer OCR. – So, SensePlayer OCR it is!

 

A lot of people must have also found it interesting though, because when I contacted our distributor to order it, it was out of stock, so I had to wait a month or so for it to come. And it finally came today, yay! Actually I totally didn’t expect it today so I was in a bit of a shock initially. 

 

I haven’t really been able to use it much yet, because only when it arrived did I realise that I don’t have the right memory card for it. PlexTalk uses an SD card, while SensePlayer needs a Micro SD one, and I was absolutely sure that I must have some Micro SD card somewhere along with an adapter, but, well, if I do, I must’ve hidden it very well or something because it’s nowhere to be found. And I have all my books, music and everything on SD cards, so before my new SensePlayer can be of use for me, I’ll have to transfer the whole Bibiel collection, so I bought a Micro SD card with an adapter which should be here tomorrow. But I already know how to turn it on and off, so that’s a start, isn’t it? 

 

This SensePlayer thing is really cool, or seems to be from what I’ve heard and read, because it feels really modern compared to all the other available book players. It seems like HIMS (the company who make it) must have really thought about something that will make it a worthwhile purchase not only for desperate little changephobic Bibielz like me or newly blind/elderly/technophobic individuals, but also other blind people who will no longer be impressed with a simple DAISy, mp3 and txt player (DAISY is the format in which most talking books are made currently). For example, the extended OCR version has a built-in camera and is able to scan documents. I have the OCR version, even though I don’t actually plan on using it for scanning paper documents because I have a scanner specifically for that, but what I do like is that it can also recognise text in PDF files, and I often read PDF books that are originally images so that should be very useful. From some presentations that I’ve heard, it has a really good mic for a device of its kind. Devices such as PlexTalk always add their own internal hum into the recordings which makes them sound very bad. Plus you can even connect an external microphone to the SensePlayer which is really cool too. Or you can use its keyboard as an iPhone keyboard, which I can totally see myself doing a lot once I figure out how, ‘cause, well, I might be good friends with my iPhone now, but those who know me know that I’m still not super efficient when having to use it solely through the touch screen, although people have been saying that apparently it’s a bit slow so we’ll see whether I’ll prefer it over my standard Bluetooth keyboard or the Braille-Sense which can also work as an iPhone keyboard. Recently I’ve heard that it got a new feature which makes it possible to record phone calls. It’s not something that I’d often have a need for, but I know that there aren’t even many mainstream devices which do that so it’s cool that they think about such things. And like I said it is on Android which means that it’s going to be expanded to be more like an Android phone or something like that. While all that is great, the final reasons why I decided on SensePlayer though are the upcoming Audible support and support for multiple languages. The latter seems like such an obvious thing, but PlexTalk really didn’t do it. I got mine with a Polish and a British English voice by default, and to my knowledge there’s no way for a user to add, for example, a Swedish voice. But SensePlayer doesn’t pose such language limits. Well, it’s still not ideal, because they use Nuance Vocalizer voices, among which there is no Welsh voice for me, but I’m used to that anyway, because it’s the same story with Apple and maybe things will change over time and we’ll be able to install Espeak, for example, whose Welsh pronunciation is DESPICABLE, but it is always something so I wouldn’t sneeze at it.

 

This means I now have a proper Apple-HIMS ecosystem here, as Braille-Sense, my notetaker, is also made by this Korean company. The PlexTalk is probably going to spend its retirement years travelling around the country with my Dad, because he says he’d like to have some audiobooks to read while driving and PlexTalk is easy enough to use that he should learn it quickly, except the charger will need to be fixed somehow. 

 

I’ve already posted a pic of PlexTalk and Braille-Sense on this blog, which should be in this post if it’s still there and I haven’t deleted the photo files from WordPress, lol (except I had an older BrailleSense model back then but the one I have now is practically identical in terms of appearance). So I thought why not share a pic of SensePlayer as well, as a way of sort of spreading awareness about how some weird blind Bibielz read their books, and just so I have an excuse to post another photo on this blog, since I do it very rarely. So, below is the photo of my brand new SensePlayer OCR, taken by my Mum, but let me know if anything’s wrong with it or something, I post photos so rarely that I’m not even sure I know how to insert images properly. 😀 

Question of the day.

   Simple question today: 

   What book are you reading right now? 

   My answer: 

   Me, well, I think the GoodReads widget on my blog is still working, in which case you should be able to see that I am reading Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset. I’ve read a lot of books by this author during the last year or so. I first read Kristin Lavransdatter some years ago, mostly because I read about it in my favourite Polish author’s – Małgorzata Musierowicz’s – books, because a lot of her female characters have read and like Kristin. I thoroughly enjoyed that book reading it for the first time, mostly because of Undset’s understanding and sensitive way of portraying people’s characters, inner lives etc. as well as the daily life of the characters (it’s a historical novel set in medieval Norway), and the strongly Scandinavian vibe generally, but also something else drew me to it that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. Not much later, I came across The Master of Hestviken and enjoyed it even more mostly for the same reasons, and again primarily was drawn to it by something that I was not really able to name. 

   I’d always wanted to reread both of them, and possibly read her other books if I could get hold of any, but only actually did that last year, when I bought both of these books for my Mum. We had fully “converted” to Traditional Catholicism not long before last Christmas,  started attending Traditional Latin Mass exclusively and all that, and I think that was what made me think of these books again, because Undset wrote both of them after converting to Catholicism, and she herself lived pre Vatican II, and so  obviously did her medieval characters, and so when I started to attend Traditional Latin Mass more regularly, read Traditional Catholic books etc. it all starkly reminded me of Kristin and Olav (Olav is the main and title character of The Master of Hestviken). And so I thought that my Mum would really enjoy them, because of the TradCat flavour, and because my Mum likes old classics, as well as Scandinavian literature (Mika Valtari for example) and I thought she and Kristin and Olav would get along supremely well. And that turned out to be very much the case, because Mum says now that Kristin Lavransdatter is the book of her life (even despite a rather clunky Polish translation which really is a translation of the German translation and initially the clunkiness and weird pseudo-archaisms in it bothered my Mum, just as they did me). Olav took more time for her to develop a liking for, but I think that might be the case for a lot of people and I totally get it even though weirdly enough I had no such problem myself. To me, as a person, Olav is actually more interesting than Kristin, because Kristin, while an introvert, is shown more from the outside, like through her daily life, what she was doing, how everything was changing etc. and, compared to Olav, her personality isn’t as well-developed. My Mum initially disagreed with me and, again, I get why, ‘cause Olav is difficult to get to know in a way, but once she read the whole Master of Hestviken she agreed with me that, despite he’s in his own head most of the time (or imho precisely because of it), he has more of a character.

   So anyway, I couldn’t just look at how my Mum was reading my two favourite books, I had to reread them myself too. And I have more time for reading than my mum and a more messed up sleep cycle so I finished both way before Mum was done with Kristin. And this time it was precisely the spiritual life of those people that grabbed my attention the most about those books, and their relationship with God, their religious customs, their thoughts about faith etc. Perhaps this was the thing that I initially was so drawn by but couldn’t quite specify, although I think there is still something more to those books  that I can’t pinpoint. Further rereads are due, I guess. But yeah, this second time I enjoyed both of them even more, and noticed a lot more about them aside from just the external stuff which was what I mostly noticed when reading them for the first time. 

   Kristin and Olav only wetted my appetite further, and so I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Sigrid Undset’s Gymnadenia (The Wild Orchid I guess it’s more commonly known as in English) series is in our blind library. I must have somehow not noticed it before because it was there way before I first read Kristin. It was weird because I was actually looking for The Wild Orchid all around the web before and it either hadn’t occurred to me to look in such an obvious place, or for some reason I didn’t see it there or something. So, even though the recording is very old and sound quality not overly enticing, and even though the narrators mispronounced most Norwegian words like people’s names or place names in both parts of the series as if they were  French or German or something which drove me up the wall, I read the whole series. It is set in early 20th century so definitely feels very different than the other two books by her that I’d read. It tells the story of Paul Selmer and focuses in particular on his way to converting to Catholicism. It didn’t captivate me nearly as much as Kristin and Olav did, and really dragged in places, the first volume was particularly difficult to get through, I guess simply because Paul as a person and his life as such resonated with me less rather than because it was a worse book or something. But I found it very interesting nevertheless to see Paul’s transformation throughout the series and read about his various reflections relating to the Catholic faith, Mass, being Catholic etc. I thought that my ardent Mum would resonate with it even more, and again, I was right. She says that, even though it is obviously not really a religious book as such but just a work of fiction, it drew her closer to God and felt very spiritually enriching for her to read at that particular point in time when she read it. 

   And while I found The Wild Orchid in our library, I also found two other books by Undset, that is Jenny and a re-telling of the Arthurian legends but I’m not sure if the latter has been translated to English so no idea what it’s called in English. I believe both of these were written before her conversion, but to someone who knows that she eventually did, you can sort of read between the lines that she was having some sort of spiritual/existential breakthrough or something. Jenny was kind of disappointing, I don’t know, I guess I just expected it to be better than it actually was and didn’t really enjoy it all that very much, but it’s still worth reading by all means and I definitely don’t regret doing it. And the Arthurian legends, well I’m a Celtophile so… yeah, had a lot of fun reading it and seeing the whole thing from a bit of a different angle than the other Arthurian legends books that I’d read before show it. It was kind of weird and kind of funny though, considering that Sigrid Undset could overall definitely be classified as a Christian writer, that these legends are absolutely full of lust, murder and other similar obscenities and there’s a lot of focus on that, like reading it you’d think their lives consisted almost solely of adulterating, fighting/killing each other and drinking and it can make you feel kind of demoralised if you’re sensitive to such things. But there was still a lot of beauty in between and a lot of Christian accents, even though not as obvious as in Kristin or Olav. 

   Since then I’ve wanted to find some other of her books but had no luck, at least in Polish. Yet, I was able to find Undset’s aforementioned biography of Catherine of Siena in English on Audible, so I got it right away. Actually before I heard a sample on Audible, I thought that it was more of a fictionalised account of her life, since I’d only read fiction books by Undset before and was a bit surprised that it’s a proper biography, but I think it just shows that she was a really incredibly versatile writer. I am slowly finishing this book and I am really liking it because of how detailed it is. It isn’t just a biography like a lot of saints’ biographies that is written solely to inspire the faithful to follow her example, it actually shows in a very realistic way what sort of person she was overall, what her life must have looked like at the time when she lived, all the chaos going on at the time around the pope’s relocation from Rome to Avignon and the relationship between France and Rome etc. so that the reader can have a pretty detailed picture of everything, while at the same time it’s also quite obviously not just a historical book because, as a devout Christian herself, she also does focus a lot on the most important thing that is Catherine’s spiritual and mystical life so I’d say it’s a very edifying read at the same time and I feel sad for my Mum that she probably won’t be able to get hold of it anywhere in Polish unless some second-hand bookshop if she’s lucky. My dream is now that I could read her books in Norwegian one day, but for now the mere thought feels rather intimidating. 😀 Also, having read quite a few of her books by now, I am growing more and more curious of Sigrid Undset herself, as a person, and her life. I mean, I’m usually like that, when I read a book, or listen to music or anything like that, I quite automatically think about the individual behind it and what they must have been like to create that particular thing, but in this case I’m actually very seriously curious, and I wish someone wrote a thorough biography of her, but so far haven’t come across anything like that. Also these days I have another reason for being so much into her books. I’ve been praying for someone who is Norwegian, and I find it extremely encouraging and heartening in my efforts to know that such very deeply Christian books were born in Norway, and not very long ago at all, when Norway was already a largely secular country. 

   So, how about your current read(s)? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What’s one thing you still prefer to do the old-fashioned way, regardless of technology and why? 

   My answer: 

   I’ve talked about this before, but definitely reading books. And no, obviously I don’t mean that I prefer reading physical books over ebooks/audiobooks, that would be cool if I could actually afford it and have enough place to store all those books, because I’d love to be able to read physical books, but it’s inconvenient, clunky, and either limiting when you get them from a library, because Braille books are costly and slow to produce so the available books are FAAAAR fewer than standard print, or it’s super expensive if you’re desperate enough to order a book to be printed just for yourself. 

   What I actually mean is that I much prefer reading books on a specialised device for the blind like a book player or a Braille display, rather than on the phone, which seems to be the most popular option right now among blind people. Specialised book players are no longer particularly trendy and aren’t even produced as much as they used to be, simply because people are turning to phones now which are cheaper than specialised devices, and it doesn’t pay off for people to buy a specialised device for double the price of an iPhone when such a device has a lot fewer functions, even if oftentimes the functions it does have work better than on an iPhone because it was made to do a few specific things rather than everything possible. Book players are more of a thing with older blind people, like such who have lost their sight later in life and don’t necessarily feel up to learning how to use an iPhone blindly when they never even had a desire to that when they could still see. Their advantage is that they are obviously always accessible, and very intuitive and easy to use. Braille displays/notetakers  are of course still in demand because people use them in connection with their mainstream devices like a phone or computer, but still I guess few people use their displays like that they just put an SD card in them and read books directly from them, without connecting to anything, like I do. 

   The reason why I prefer reading books the way I do is very simple – because that’s what I’m used to and because that is most comfortable to me. – My current book player that I’ve had for some seven years (although not the same copy). While it is still sold, its firmware hasn’t been developed in a couple years and will no longer be, so it has lost some of its features already. For example  sharing files between it and a computer over a network folder because the protocol it used for that is outdated and no longer secure and no self-respecting computer will let you do that anymore. Which is generally a bummer because, yeah, you can of course theoretically connect it via USB like anyone sane would, except it’s not the best idea because when you unplug it, it just freezes and dies, and you have to take the battery out and put it back in, and if you need to exchange files on it regularly it’s not cool because sooner or later you’re going to damage the battery holder from constant playing with it. This has been a bug since forever and I know a few other people who’ve had it, but it never ended up being properly solved. So now I just use an SD adapter instead rather thann connecting to the PlexTalk as such when I want to add new files. But worse yet is the fact that it has lost support for Audible, because Audible ditched its older audio format. I was disconsolate because the sole reason for why I chose PlexTalk over a much cheaper device of its kind (which had the Jacek voice in it unlike PlexTalk!!! 😭) when I last got funding was because PlexTalk is the only one I know about here in Poland that supports Audible, and back then Audible was my only source of English books except for BookShare, and then after a few months there’s no Audible. I wrote both to Audible people and to Shinano Kenshi (PlexTalk) people but Audible people very gently expressed that they don’t really care, and Shinano Kenshi people wrote to me like half a year later (because they’re doing other things now, duh) saying that, yeeeah, they could, theoretically, maybe, add the support for the new format (which has also been around for quite some time already and it’s not like Audible has suddenly introduced a new one and ditched the old one simultaneously) but it doesn’t really pay off, to sum it up shortly.

   In the meantime (between Audible ditching its old format and Shinano Kenshi responding to me) I finally got myself an iPhone, and part of my motivation was to have easier access to Audible, and to finally get used to read like most people (using the app Voice Dream Reader) because it also has the Jacek voice in it and because I kept hearing how it’s so so cool and as good as a book player. 

   I tried several times to make this transition, both with audiobooks and with ebooks, but it just doesn’t work for me. With all its annoyingness, I like PlexTalk because it’s small, so I can put it under my pillow and read in bed like that. It doesn’t really feel like an option with a phone, I mean I could theoretically, but, uh, who sleeps with a phone under the pillow. And the radiation and everything! PlexTalk has Wi-Fi, but I don’t use it anyway, so it’s always turned off for me, and even if it still emits some radiation it’s never going to be nowhere near that of an iPhone. Or I can read much more comfortably in the car or a public place. With an iPhone, I would have to also bring  headphones, and I’m a control freak and don’t like having my hearing limited while being around other people in not very familiar places or situations, and with PlexTalk I can just keep it at a low volume near my cheek and have everything under control, no one hears it but I do perfectly fine. I’ve done that for ages and it’s just the only thing that feels right. Also if I’m reading in bed, I’m used to also having some music or radio quietly going on in the background, because a softly speaking speech synth alone going from a mini mono speaker doesn’t fulfill my need for sound entirely, and I use my phone for the music/radio, so I can’t simultaneously use it for reading because it would be one big chaos. Unless Apple one day introduces the possibility to have multiple audio outputs at the same time, and regulating the volume of each separately, then I might reconsider it once again.

   And another thing is, I am just not crazy about Voice Dream Reader at all. I don’t want to say I don’t like it, because i can see it is generally a very good reading app compared to other reading phone apps, and it’s amazing that it exists because I still do use it sometimes for language learning and many people find it very useful. Oh yeah, and there’s Jacek, I even purchased him in the app, and I also bought a Welsh voice because I have none on the computer anymore after it got lost irretrievably just like Jacek so I read Welsh stuff with Voice Dream Reader out of necessity because I myself am a very slow Welsh reader, even though it’s a south Welsh voice as opposed to North Welsh which I’m learning, and reads some colloquial things really oddly. In my opinion, Voice Dream Reader doesn’t work very smoothly with Braille, it keeps losing focus or throws me into random places in the text when panning (moving through the lines of Braille) and Braille reading like that is just really cumbersome and annoying. . And even if you don’t read Braille but just listen to speech, navigating within that book isn’t quite as smooth and precise as it is in all the specialised devices that I’ve used so far, and I’ve used four different kinds in my life. That’s all probably because Voice Dream Reader isn’t really an app for the blind, but generally people with all sorts of print disabilities so it doesn’t really cater to any of these disabilities in particular I guess but just tries to work for everyone.

   So yeah, I much prefer either my PlexTalk, for reading with a speech synth, or Braille-Sense (my Braille notetaker) as a standalone for reading books in Braille. 

   My eccentric reading requirements, unfortunately, meant that I had to figure out how to strip DRM’s from Audible, alongside all sorts of English-language ebooks from major retailers (really people, why don’t you just use watermarks? :O ) which I feel very sad about that I have to do it, but if they don’t want to be like properly inclusive… Perhaps at some point when/if the Marrakesh Treaty will become a thing in practice everywhere I won’t have to buy mainstream books anymore. Or regarding Audible alone I’ve heard that there is/is going to be some new device that actually supports the enhanced Audible format, so when my PlexTalk stops working and I’ll have a good gut feeling about that other device in general I’ll happily buy it instead, because it’s not like it’s some extreme fun spending an hour stripping books, the more that I have to do it on Sofi’s PC because I don’t know of a way to do it on Mac that would be both accessible and secure and that’s an inconvenience for us both. So let’s hope that Audible doesn’t come up with a new format until my PlexTalk dies, lol. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

I am reading…

My answer:

…Actually re-reading, at the moment. I am re-reading a Norwegian family saga called Livets Døtre (there is no English translation but the title means Daughters of Life) by May Grethe Lerum, in Polish. I came across this series a couple years ago in our Polish blind library and I felt super ambivalent about it! On one hand it’s just so interesting, it takes place in like 18th century Norway and follows the lives of women in quite a particular family living in a Norwegian village, who have extremely weird, tangled and overly and sometimes totally unnecessarily complicated life paths, but there’s 35 volumes in total if I remember correctly so if not all that it would probably take up much less, it sometimes feels rather forced though. I love historical fiction which portrays people’s lives and not necessarily all the political stuff and things like that but simply what life was like then, for different kinds of people. And that’s what these books show very well. Well, I don’t know if they show it thoroughly from a historical point of view and whether a historian would approve, but what I mean by well is that it’s interesting and sounds quite convincing to me. These women have some kind of gift or curse or what you may call it in their family that enables them to heal people or at least help them when they’re sick, and that’s both in terms of that they’re really knowledgeable about herbs and all the medical knowledge that was available to people there and then, but also something more like a superpower or something that they sometimes use. So they help people and treat them from all sorts of things, and it’s really interesting to read about in fiction. The characters are mostly portrayed very colourfully and feel almost alive although sometimes you can feel a lot of something that feels like some bias from the author as if you could figure out whom in the series she likes more and whom she likes less and sometimes it’s a little annoying. And then there’s Ravi Reinsson, or Reinsen or I don’t really even know what his surname is in the original, Ravi son of Rein anyways, on whom, when reading that series for the first time, I got quite a strong faza. I had several literary fazas before but this was definitely the strongest and longest-lasting. It’s partly because of Ravi, and partly because of my current affair with the Norwegian language, which wasn’t a thing back when I read it for the first time, that I decided to re-read this saga. On the other hand, despite enjoying so many aspects of it a lot, I had some problems with this series and a lot of little things and a couple bigger things that I found really annoying and sometimes even quite disturbing with this series and this hasn’t changed now that I’m re-reading it and some of that maybe even is more glaring. And the translation… ugh! I mean, overall it’s not bad, but some bits literally have such awful grammar, or just really awkward. Yet at the same time the aspects of it that were enjoyable for me the first time, are no less enjoyable for me now, and maybe even more so. I have been racing through these books, I can’t recall now when exactly I’ve started reading this series but I think more or less around the time when I got sick with that bronchitis thing, and since I had a lot of time for reading, as well as because it’s interesting while not being very challenging at all, especially that I read it once before, it’s going really fast, and I’m now on volume 15. There’s no Ravi yet but I’m curious if my faza is going to reactivate or something and how my brain’s gonna react. But yeah, overall it’s an interesting experience to reread this.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

What are three books on your to read list?

My answer:

I have quite a pile of books to read so let’s look at it and see what’s going to be next. The three books that I’m going to read next, unless something else comes up in between that I’d be interested in enough that I’d want to prioritise, are quite diverse in their topics, but they’re all non fiction. First there’s a Polish book – “Wampiry, Potwory, Upiory i Inne Nieziemskie Stwory” (which translates to Vampires, Monsters, Phantoms, and Other Unearthly Creatures) by Sylwia Błach and Paulina Daniluk, which is, as one might guess from the title, about all sorts of monsters and scary creatures from various mythologies and other folklore that has accumulated in the world over time.

Then I’m going to read another book about the Miracle of Fatima (I’ve read quite a few before). It’s Fatima: My Immaculate Heart Will Triumph by fr. Joao Scognamiglio Cla Dias, however I’m going to read it in Polish. For those who may not know, the Miracle of Fatima took place in 1917 in a small village of Fatima in Portugal, where, over the course of a few months, three children – Lucia Santos and Francisco and Jacinta Marto – had apparitions of the Virgin Mary. These apparitions have since then been declared worthy of belief by the Catholic Church, and the cultus of the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Fatima has been approved, and the children have been canonised.

And then the next book I’m going to read is in English, and it’s And I don’t Want to Live This Life by Deborah Spungen, mother of Nancy Spungen who was the girlfriend of Sid Vicious from Sex Pistols, and who was murdered by him, she also struggled with mental illness since childhood.

So yeah, a lot of diversity here.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

What are three things you’re reading?

My answer:

These days I usually try to read one book at a time, and so is the case right now. I’ve just started a new book this morning, and this is Your Brain Explained by Mark Dingman, if I remember the English title correctly as I’m reading it in Polish. I found it among the newly added books to our online blind library, as an audiobook (or should we say talking book as the audiobooks specifically for blind people are called), and since I like reading brain books, even as basic as this one seems to be so far, I picked it up along with several other new books that I found interesting when looking at their synopses. I’m only a few chapters into it but it’s interesting and easily digestible.

Other than that, I’m about to catch up on some blogs I follow and emails I’ve got, so will be reading all that too very soon.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

What was the last book you read? Did you enjoy it?

My answer:

Village School by Miss Read. I’d been wanting for the longest time to read something from this author, particularly Miss Clare Remembers and No Holly For Miss Quinn, which are two books in her Fairacre series which inspired Enya (one of my faza people) to compose two pieces of music with the same names. Just listening to those songs I always thought that if they have book equivalents, they must be great, and reading their synopses made me think they were right up my alley, but there was no Polish translation, or at least I couldn’t find any, and it’s fairly recently, some two years ago I guess, that I’ve seriously started reading English-language books of all sorts more regularly and casually, that is not solely for learning the language and new vocabulary. GoodReads must have also figured that it would be right up my alley, because recently I’ve found the first book from this series (the aforementioned Village School) in my recommendations on there, and since now I have access to different places where I can get English books and I read them regularly, I figured I really need to give this series a go now. It took me some time to get into it properly, but I really did enjoy this book and I felt really at home in it by the time I finished. It was really sweet and charming and I absolutely loved her way of describing characters, I love authors whose characters I can actually imagine and who seem life-like, her way of describing things in general is amazing, and I liked her sense of humour.

At more or less the same time I happened to learn that a guy I used to follow quite regularly some years ago, who teaches Swedish online and is a Swede himself and generally seems quite crazy about languages, has written a handbook for Swedish learners, called A Lagom Guide To Swedish. I figured I could really use some good Swedish offline resource that I wouldn’t need to scan or anything, so I bought the ebook right away. And while it’s a handbook, so generally not something you’d just read like from cover to cover, that was precisely what I ended up doing, in just a few sittings. 😀 I was quite curious how much of the things in this book I would have already known, so I started just skimming through it, but then got positively surprised that I actually know SO much of the stuff he covered in it, and even more surprised and happy whenever I came across something I didn’t know or realise, that I just didn’t want to put it aside. It really boosted my self-esteem in terms of Swedish, because ever since my English has leapt so much forward, I’ve been feeling less confident about my Swedish than I was before, even despite I managed with it quite well in Stockholm and I can get along with people just fine, I always have an impression that my Swedish, compared with my English, feels kind of clunky and it’s not as easy for me to express everything in it as it is in English, even though there was a time when my Swedish was waay better than my English. So I’m really glad I came across that book, even for this one reason. And it’ll definitely still be useful in different situations.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

How old were you when you learned to read? Did you learn by sight memorisation, or sounding out letters?

My answer:

I wrote a post answering a similar question before, so I won’t write a lot in detail here. If I remember correctly, I was about 7-8 when I learned to read and it was through memorisation.

How was it with you? 🙂

Question of the day.

What was the last book you read?

My answer:

Hm, lemme see… Ah yeah, Here Be Dragons by Sharon Kay Penman. I think I was mentioning in some coffee share or something like that a few months ago that I was reading The Brothers of Gwynedd quartet by Edith Pargeter, which my penfriend recommended to me, about the Welsh prince Llywelyn (or Llewelyn as he’s spelt in the book) the Last. I really enjoyed that, even just because it was the first historical novel set in Wales that I didn’t cringe at. I’m not a history buff or anything like that, not even an expert in the history of Celtic countries, but even I was able to see some – sometimes quite glaring unrealistic-ness in historical novels set in Wales that I read before, and if I can spot something like that it often peeves me in fiction, or at least certain kinds of books. But also I really enjoyed that series for a lot of other reasons and it was a delicious read, so I went on a quest to find something at least a bit similar in that it would be reasonably realistic and also well-written and just enjoyable for me. So that’s why I decided to read Here Be Dragons, which is the first book in the Welsh Princes series, telling the story of Llywelyn the Great, who is not to be confused with Llywelyn the Last whom I mentioned earlier.

That was a great book too, although I think I prefer Edith Pargeter’s writing style, well, at least for this kind of books. But I didn’t have to cringe at it either, and I liked that the characters were well-developed and not wishy-washy. It was a bit difficult to get actually involved in for me and the beginning felt very slow-paced, even though I normally have no problem with slow-paced books if I like them overall because I don’t mind relishing a book and not racing through it, because I usually feel like I read too fast anyway and that I would have liked to be able to enjoy a book for longer. 😀 This one really did drag a bit in some places. But, overall, it was a very positive experience.

You? 🙂

Question of the day.

What was the last book you read?

My answer:

I’ve just finished a great non-fiction Polish book “W Salonie I W Kuchni. Opowieść O Kulturze Materialnej Polskich Pałaców I Dworów W XIX Wieku” (In the Salon and Kitchen, the Story of Material Culture of Polish 19th Century Palaces and Manors). I like to read about how people used to live in terms of daily lives, and I just got this book a few days ago in our online library for the blind over here, it was just added I believe, so I grabbed it straight away. It was all about how those palaces and manors looked like, what all the rooms were for, what people did in each of them, what the furniture was like, how people started using different things in their households and how they were changing over the years, what people ate, when, in what way, how different customs of that time had evolved, how the cuisine was changing over time etc. etc. etc. It was written in quite an engaging way so that made it an easy read, and I read it in no time. There were also some interesting new words for me that I liked. 😀 I got also strongly convinced that 19th century Poland wouldn’t probably be a place where I’d like to live, or at least not in a palace/manor. 😀 For one very simple reason. Too many people everywhere! I’ve heard a lot about Slavic/Polish hospitality but only reading this book I ttruly realised to what kind of extends it went, how people had guests or were visiting someone ALL the fricken time, plus there were a lot of people in such households anyway – big families, servants, residents and the like. – I’d go crazy in a week.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

Hi people! 🙂

What is something that is making you feel good, these days? 🙂

My answer:

Misha’s presence is always making me feel good. Right now he’s sleeping on the wardrobe and he has spent almost the entire day with me.

The cooler weather is making me feel good, too. The summer heat has been quite exhausting for me, and for Misha too, also for my Mum and I think for a lot of people as it was really a long time and at times felt insanely hot, and I’m really glad that it’s cooler now, it feels very pleasant outside.

The fact that my Dad’s at work so I don’t have to deal with him for a few days 😀 – he’d had quite long holidays recently and now he’s gone back to work yesterday. It gets unpleasant and stale when you’re spending so much time with someone and you’re not really on the same wavelength at all.

Music. I’ve been listening to lots of great music, but that’s nothing new. Also my great speaker and headphones that I’ve got myself recently and that I use with my iPhone. I really love my computer speakers as well, but, as I always listen to something quietly at night, it wasn’t as much of a pleasure listening to something at night on them, with all the accompanying hum of my desktop computer.

Food always makes me feel good as well. Today we had very yummy chocolate budyń with Mum. Mum makes it on her own, it’s not the instant, shop-bought budyń. I think I’ve explained somewhere on here earlier what budyń is, but if you don’t know, it’s kinda like a creamy Polish pudding. Only Mum put a bit too much chocolate into it, and while it was extremely delicious, it was really, really sweet, and neither of us was able to eat a lot. 😀

Books make me feel good. Right now I’m reading a very amusing Polish book, which is basically an anthology of different texts from mostly Polish literature, but not only, from different time periods and genres, all about cats! I’ve just started it today in the morning but I think it’s going to be very enjoyable for me. And the last book I read was “Harriet and the Cherry Pie” by Clare Compton, a lovely English children’s book, the style and plotline of which reminded me very strongly of Noel Streatfeild, and I like things like these. Since the main character lived in her great aunt’s cafe, there was lots of food involved.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day (13th August).

Hi people! 🙂

Do you read or watch TV before falling asleep?

My answer:

I always read before going to sleep. I also listen to the music before I fall asleep and while I’m sleeping, as that helps me with anxiety and also I just like it this way. I read on my PlexTalk, and have a sleeptimer on, so that the book doesn’t keep on going or at least not too much when I’m already asleep. And in the background I have my iPhone quietly on, just enough so that I can hear it, either playing music on Spotify or some radio. If it’s radio it’s either playing some station which plays only music, and such that I really really like, and there are only few stations whose music I’d love so unreservedly, or, more often, it’s just talk in one of my favourite languages. Sometimes I also listen to some podcasts in bed but that’s rather if I’m not planning to go to sleep just yet.

How is it with you? 🙂

Question of the day.

Hi people! 🙂

Simple question:

What are you reading? 🙂

My answer:

As you should be able to see in the GoodReads widget, Im reading a foster care memoir by Maggie Hartley called “Exploited”. I read almost all of her memoirs that were available on Audible, but it seems like most of them, or at least quite a few, are not, so now I’m getting them from Kobo. I’ve started this book last night before going to bed, and then didn’t sleep too well, falling asleep after 2 AM and waking already about 6, but didn’t dare getting up and doing something more constructive because I had Sofi sleeping with me since Mum’s away so she is afraid to sleep on her own, and Misha was sleeping between us and I didn’t want to wake either of them up, so I spent a large portion of the night reading it, and now I’m almost at the end. It’s been enjoyable like all Maggie Hartley’s books have been to me but also rather very predictable. The next book on my list is “Thinking in Pictures” by Temple Grandin, I’m curious what it’ll be like and how I’ll like it.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

Hi guys! 🙂

You’re in a beautiful garden in the warm sunshine, what do we find you doing?

My answer:

Sitting with either my Braille-Sense or PlexTalk and reading a book, or just thinking.

You? 🙂

Question of the day.

Hi people! 🙂

What is a single least favourite book, that you have finished reading anyways or was required to read?

My answer:

Hm, usually I don’t waste my time on reading books I don’t like and when I can’t get into it for a long time and it doesn’t look like I’m going to become interested in the plot line any time soon, or if something bothers me strongly, I just put it away. I find it a bit hilarious how some people wade through books they don’t like just because they’ve started something and have a sort of mental tradition that they must finish every book they have started no matter what. My Mum is like that, and I sometimes feel for her because I find it the worse when someone takes a long time to read one book like she does because she doesn’t have much time for reading, so instead of quickly starting something new and more interesting, she’s tormenting herself with one, boring book for months. I have to have a really sound reason and determination to read a book I don’t like, or have to feel very strongly forced, but, although I really enjoy reading books I like and read ALL the time, I even cheated with school compulsory readings quite frequently, because I didn’t like most of them. There certainly must be some books that I’ve read whole despite not enjoying them and not liking them at all, but currently I just can’t think of anything.

Oh, I was just going to publish this post when something did came to my mind, lol! That was the first (longer) book that I read whole despite not being interested in it one bit, and it was quite a hilarious and strange thing. When I was just starting school, I think I’d just learned to read fairly fluently and started to enjoy it thoroughly, I once went to the library to get brothers’ Grim Fairytales – my Mum read them to me countless times and made me love all sorts of fairytales and other folklore creations at a very early age as you may already know – because I finally wanted to read them myself and I was absolutely excited about it. I asked the librarian for it and was presented with an extremely, deliciously heavy book, and got back to my room and immediately started to read it. I was very surprised by its content, though, it wasn’t anything like what my Mum read to me. There was no Red Riding Hoods, Rapunzels and the like, but loads of strange, long words and names that were completely unfamiliar to me. I hadn’t read many actual books by then really, and was still learning to navigate them and the whole literary world, so I was thinking, perhaps it was some sort of an introduction, foreword… whatever, and kept on reading, there was no actual table of contents either as far as I remember and I was thinking maybe it was important to read it when reading the whole book, as it happens with some books. I actually don’t know why I kept on reading it so determinedly and diligently, it was completely unlike me, and why I didn’t realise that perhaps something was wrong with it that it’s so very off topic and didn’t notice anything, or at least try to skip the boring pages instead of reading it page after page, and I’ve read quite a fair bit of it I believe, even though I remember literally yawning at it and was growing more and more discouraged, so, I think it was quite silly. Even though I didn’t make the conclusion myself, which, as I said, I find weird a little, but maybe I was just too new to the literary world, someone finally helped me. A volunteer who was working in our boarding school group at the time once went up to me and asked what I was reading, and I told her that brothers Grimm, but it’s not really quite as interesting as I thought and doesn’t really remind me in any way of what my Mum used to read to me. She asked me if she could have a look, and then we were both surprised because the book I was reading was definitely no fairytales! I don’t know the English title of this book if it was translated to English, but it was by Vitus Dröscher and it was about animals, but not quite something that would be fitting for children of my age then. It was quite scientific and geeky and if I remember correctly, it was about some rules and behaviours that different animals have. And I was never an animal/nature geek very much, even when I read magazines for children and there was always a more or less extensive article on how different wild animals live, I usually was happy to skip it. So the mystery was finally resolved! 😀 They had to make a mistake at the library, probably based on the signature of the book or something. I really loved reading though, and it was what I usually did when I didn’t have anything more interesting to do or just in my free time, and I think I didn’t go with that book right away to the library but don’t remember why, perhaps it was the weekend, or perhaps I didn’t have an opportunity or anyone to go with me, or perhaps I was anxious of peopling with people I didn’t know very well, but I think I had that book with me for a while yet and am pretty sure that, even though it felt even more boring now that I knew what it was about and that there wasn’t going to be anything interesting further, I kept on reading it for a few more days when I had nothing better to do and wanted to read something. And since as I said I was a fairly fast reader, I think I may have read it whole, or if not whole, then at least the greater part of it. 😀

You? 🙂

Question of the day.

Who taught you to read?

My answer:

Since despite multiple attempts and good will my parents have never learnt Braille, moreover, doubted I’ll be able to learn it when I was little, I learnt to read at school, as I think the vast majority of blind people would. In spite their doubts, it really didn’t take me that much time to master it. I didn’t like reading at the beginning, but once I’ve become more fluent at it I grew to love it and my teacher was actually saying I read way too quickly and too much (no idea where the boundary between enough and too much lies in this case 😀 ). Nevertheless, when she found out that I feel slightly bored with the stuff we had to read at school, for some time she wrote little stories for me that I could practice reading during longer school breaks when I was at home, they were all – just as I wanted it – about a little boy named Jacek. These weren’t hard to read either, especially that I would tell the whole plot to her earlier so she’d know what to write, and I was actually the one making them up, but at least that was fun and not boring and felt quite special to me. 😀 I guess though that with time it became a bit of a pain in the neck for her, haha, so I had to move on and start writing stories myself which turned out to be even more fun as no one would understand my ideas as well as I do!

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day (1st July).

What was the first book you remember reading?

My answer:

I guess I did a post on that in the past myself, don’t know if it was as a part of question of the day series, so rather than writing the whole story again, I’ll just simply say that it was “God And The Mouse” by Angela Toigo. Very boring, and too short for my reading skills haha, read it in one afternoon.

What was yours? 🙂

Question of the day (27th June).

Do you read a book in one sitting or over multiple days?

My answer:

It really depends, but I guess it takes me a relatively short time compared to most people I know to read a book. Probably because I read more, because I have a possibility to read more, paradoxically. I read before falling asleep, after waking up, when riding/commuting, when I’m bored and have nothing else to do, waiting for anything, sometimes even when I’m eating a meal or having a bath or anything basic like that. And if something interests me, I can just sit with it until I finish it, or sometimes I will relish it as long as possible, though I rarely can read a book longer than a week, becauseI simply read too often and in too big chunks I guess.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day (26th June).

Hi people! 🙂

Here are some more bookish questions for you. 🙂

Can you read while hearing music?

My answer:

Sure. I am a multitasker, as long as it doesn’t require coordination or other such skills, and I like listening to music while reading. I almost always do, and it actually helps me to focus even more and feel more absorbed by a book. I like to listen to music that could work as a soundtrack to the book I’m reading. I love both listening to music and reading so why not do both at the same time.

How is it for you? 🙂

Question of the day.

What is a book you dislike that everyone else seems to love?

My answer:

“Harry Potter”, “Twilight” and other trendy stuff that people get mad about. I just don’t feel it one bit. I tried convincing myself to “Twilight” but I actually really dislike books about vampires they are so odd and I just don’t see what’s so appealing about them. Especially about the romance part, ugh, a vampire like Edward Cullen is certainly not my type of a guy. One thing is I simply don’t like most of the fantasy genre, so it’s just boring for me. And another is that if everyone seems to love something, I will most likely dislike it. 😀 That’s just how I am. There are exceptions, but I won’t like something, or even I won’t usually read something, just because everyone else does.

What is such book for you? 🙂