Reading opens up doorways to many worlds. Characters on the page become real in our minds; events take on a life of their own. Plots cause emotions to rise and fall. It becomes easy to get lost in the world created by a writer. I allow myself to get absorbed in what I’m reading. And each book or story I read expands my mind more.
Growing up, reading and books were part of my life. I don’t recall a time when I didn’t read. Can I say it runs in the family? My mom is a reader and I recall Harlequin books lying around the house. Her father, my grandfather, also was a voracious reader. His favorite genre was westerns; I could always find books strewn throughout my grandparents’ house.
And so that gift and love for reading was passed down to me. My first memory of my love of reading extends to third grade when we’d get small prizes for each book we read. During elementary school, each time Scholastic book sheets were sent out, I’d buy a book or two. It started with Encyclopedia Brown and began evolving into books with strange tales. My love for the weird started young.
At home my parents owned an outdated set of the World Book Encyclopedia and I remember picking out volumes and leafing through them. I would read all the entries. I don’t know where the encyclopedias came from (they were pre-moon landing) but I’m grateful they made their way to my house. I think I read all of them and owe a lot of my knowledge to what I read back then.
Gradually, as I entered adolescence and early teen years, my taste expanded and broadened. In seventh grade some friends and I would head over to the junior high library during the lunch hour and we’d read books. (The librarians technically were not allowed to let students in, but we were a special lot.) I got introduced to Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators. I loved reading about the adventures of Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw and Bob Andrews. But then my interest grew from mystery to horror and I was introduced to Stephen King that same year of school. I still remember being with my mom at a Kroger store in Alice, Texas, and seeing the paperback of King’s Pet Sematary. The entirety of the cover consisted of a cat, mouth open, hissing, green eyes glaring. I was hooked and have been ever since.
King played a large role in my early repertoire of reading. By the mid-1980s, King had amassed quite a few books and I was up for the challenge. Despite the books’ horror element, my parents let me read them. In the next few years I went through Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, Christine, Cycle of the Werewolf, Cujo, The Talisman and Night Shift.
My reading was probably considered limited but for a teenager, I was getting my fix of horror and I loved it. I could see those doorways into other worlds expanding..soon.
Then in the summer of 1986 I lost most of my eye sight to optic neuropathy and that changed everything. All those doors leading to other worlds shut in my face. Reading was over.
This is the audiobook technology Roel has used over the past twenty-five years. The machine on the top plays audiobooks on cassette and is the first audiobook technology Roel used in the mid-1980s. The machine on the bottom left plays downloaded digital audiobooks stored in a jump drive. The small machine on the bottom right is the Victor Stream Reader and stores digital audiobooks on an SD card.
But as luck would have it. I wasn’t out for the count. When I became involved with the Texas Commission for the Blind, they connected me with the Talking Book program. I received a large cassette player machine and a huge record player. The cassette player played tapes that had recordings on four sides. I’d switch a button on the machine and side 1 and 2 became to side 3 and 4.
Just because I had a new way to read, which was listening to books, it wasn’t an immediate love affair. I was accustomed to holding a book, smelling the pages and listening to the rustle of the pages and sitting on the bed or on the couch reading.
Now, instead of using my eyes to absorb the words, I had to use my ears to listen and grasp information. So the path I used to visualize these fictional worlds changed. It was a begrudging change. It took me more than a year to get comfortable with listening to books. But once I did get comfortable, all those doorways opened up for me and many new worlds came flooding into my mind.
Over the years, the way I listen to books has changed as technology improves. While I still own that ancient cassette player, about three years ago I received a new version of the player that plays digital books via downloaded books from a special web site for the blind and physically handicapped that is called BARD. I now upload and download audiobooks into a flashdrive.
More recently I received a new gadget called a Victor Stream that is small and portable. I download digital books from BARD into this device. Finally, I listen to audiobooks on my KindleFire.
So technology has kept me in the reading loop over the past twenty-eight years of being visually impaired. I am grateful for the technology for keeping all those doorways open.
Over the years I’ve experienced the world of the white whale, Roland and the Dark Tower, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, Hemingway’s Paris of the 1920s, Chicago during the Columbian World’s Fair, Cougar and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show and vivid landscapes of McMurtry.
- Roel -