burn my eye, boil my water

I stumbled across the Bartleby.com website today, and though I'm quite sure I'm the last one to hear about it, I thought the idea of an online resource of complete texts of books was rather neat. The question is, does anyone actually want to read an entire book from the monitor attached to their humming electro death box? As one who has recently been chastized by an optometrist/diagnosed with neovascularization , I don't think spending hours staring at tiny font on a luminous square is quite for me. And the constant scrolling? Eesh.

I ain't no technophobe, now. On the contrary, I am smitten with my hummming electro death box. However, I think computing technology seems to excel in doing things quickly, and fails miserably at the sort of task that is supposed to take a great deal of time. Like reading 19th century novels and boiling water*

*If your CPU can, in fact, be used as a make-shift hot plate for boiling water, you are a) lucky to be able to make yourself cups of hot steaming beverage without missing a single refreshed page of a webcam and b) likely developing some sort of tumor in a place you didn't know you could get a tumor, like the earlobe or Islets of Langerhans.**

**This reminds me that I intended to include an example of the sort of delightful prose that can be found on Bartelby.com, this one by the fantastically named author Björnstjerne Björnson from the equally fantastically named book A Happy Boy:

He got hot all over, looked about, and called: “Goatie-goatie, and goatie-wee!”

(It's not a Fall quote, but I do like to think of Mark E. Smith saying it.)