What's Your Source for Reading Material These Days?

My public library and local bookstores are all closed. I have a library of about 500 volumes, a Kindle loaded up with various classics that are in the public domain, and a newspaper subscription that serve as my source of reading these days. My appetite for reading is kind of finicky right now and I find that many titles that might ordinarily tempt me do not.

They are too serious, or too silly, or too dry, or... but really it's me, not them. Close confinement has not been conducive to attempts at adventurous and expansive reading. It's all I can do to knock down 50 pages a night.

How are you finding reading in these plague-ridden times?

does it have to be book reading?

im sure itll turn out to be heinous for some reason or another but im taking advantage of the readly app on my tablet to get access to my fill of magazines across a pretty impressive array of subjects

you will need something with a display rather than a basic text output tho

doesn't have to be books. reading is reading and sometimes books do not appeal.

I have more than enough unread books, plus I spend probably a third of my reading time rereading. I've reread Lolita, Lucky Jim, and Time Regained in the last month. I also dug up a bunch of my old philosophy books and photocopies from school. The isolation and lack of anything to do seems to have put me back in a philosophy mood.

I tend to always have a stack of unread books enough to last me at least 6 months, so I'm not in any danger of running out of reading material. Since I'm working from home about the same number of hours as I was working at the office before, I find that I don't have much more time to read, or if I do, it's taken up by reading about coronavirus-related news. So I haven't been reading any faster - probably I'm close to the pace I maintained last year.

Recently I've been reading so much on an iPad that it feels odd to read a paper book and not be able to touch words to look them up.

A few sources of digital reading material:

Extensive runs of many magazines can be browsed and read online via Google Books, https://books.google.com/books/magazines/language/en

The Internet Archive, https://archive.org/, has launched a National Emergency Library

and of course there's Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/

Almost exclusively using an app offered by my libraries (have accounts with 3 different cities, had planned to collect more as souvenirs but oh well to all that). Mostly ravenous for horror right now, kind of like wanting ice cream when it's cold outside.

I used to have too many books. I'd get shopping carts full from thrift stores, and the Salvation Army used to sell as many as you could fit in a bag for a dollar. Sooo many books. Bookshelves along all the walls, in front of the windows, stacked on top of bookshelves, books layered 2 or 3 deep. I got rid of my bed and slept on the floor to make room for more bookshelves. A freestanding one fell over on me while I was sleeping once. I've calmed down a little since then. Honed it all down to 1 tall bookshelf of essential reference/rarities/sentimental valuables, which is mostly neglected in favor of dumb shit on my phone. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I ordered a used copy of Michael Hoffman's Approximately Nowhere online a couple weeks ago. It arrived this week. Slowly working backwards through his oeuvre.

vast library, amazon, waterstones delivery, sc1hub and l1bg3n

Massive backlog of unread stuff lying around bedroom including a handfull of library books.
A lot from charity shops over the years.

Got a couple of new titles from Book depositary. One in sewing machines cos I thought I had screwed mine up.
Also got the Mike Barnes prog book cos it was something I wanted to read. Just reading the Yes chapter.
Picking up a paper for the review section on Fri and Saturday. & whatever rock monthlies I can still get. Uncut, viva le rock, wire etc.
Just got a place to get 2000ad in since the main place I got it is closed for the duration.
& listening to podcasts for most of the day.

forgot I just managed to score a copy of Motorbooty #8 the one with the Melvin Van peebles feature. have wanted one of those for the last couple of decades but hadn't really looked for it.
Think a previous copy got lost in a load of stuff when I was moving over from Dublin in '98. Met MVP himself a while before taht as he did a talk in a Dublin literary festival

I have far more books than I will probably ever get through in my lifetime - even here in my apartment. And I am a slow reader. So my shelves are plenty.

But it is true that the books I have might not be quite the ones I want to read. And I struggled badly with reading for a while during this crisis.

One disadvantage is that I don't have much 'classic fiction' - Hardy, for instance - which I would really quite like to read. For that I may eventually need to venture out and order something from a bookseller.

I wouldn't order from Amazon, unless using the 'marketplace' to contact a small bookseller counts; would prefer to go direct to the seller anyway.

yeah I saw there wasa meme going around saying that most of the sellers on Amazon had their own sites. Which I think i'd been looking into before that.
I think Book Depositary may just be a branch of Amazon so i think I probably need to watch what I'm buying from there too.

bookfinder.com can be useful think it checks most databases

(bee - ok dot see see) is helpful

I don't understand that post!

ebook source, like.
I think I prefer the actual physical paper though.

xpost

bee hyphen oh kay dot see see

or: change all the letters to the letters that follow them in the alphabet:

a-nj.bb