Retro Gaming Tech and Turn of the Century Telephone Tech

Today, as it has been before, I've read two books to write about here, though they are fairly different. The first of these is The Genius Guide to Classic Videogames Hardware 01, which seems to have been largely put together by Retro Gamer magazine. I found it for less than five dollars on the Kindle store after getting all excited that I'd found a copy of Retro Gamer at a mall in the Quad Cities, which had led me to search the magazine's title on my Kindle. I was very happy by the book, which was a lengthy and exhaustive history of video games in the United Kingdom. As such, it wasn't always entirely applicable to American gamers, but not even the most obscure gaming systems were made to sound boring. I really enjoyed reading about all of the 8-bit computers in the early parts of the book, and though I was disappointed that they didn't tried to defend the quality of the titles available on the Virtual Boy, since that could have been fascinating, I was interested in what they had to say about the machine. I also would have liked to have read about the Neo Geo, but, since it was also an arcade system, I do understand why they didn't include it. They did write about the Neo Geo Pocket Color, however, which more than made up for it.

The other, completely dissimilar book that I just finished reading is The Story of a Doctor's Telephone: as Told by His Wife by Ellen M. Firebaugh. This book is by no means as preachy as Daisy: The Autobiography of a Cat, which had so many miserable and torturous images of animal abuse as a means of combating it that it was repetitive and difficult to get through, but if you come out of this book thinking that the author wanted everyone to drink, burn down the forests, and get diseases so their children go blind, you were probably not paying much attention. To be fair, for the most part, it's a quick read and an entertaining set of antecdotes about being a country doctor in Illinois in 1912. It's sort of cool to read about how people reacted to telephones when they were new inventions, and the medical information isn't boring, either. The didactic nature of much of the book gets really tedious in spots, though, and while I appreciate the structure of the novel, in which you hear about the doctor's various phone calls and what sorts of house calls they lead to, it doesn't hold up throughout the brief length of the book. The Story of a Doctor's Telephone isn't totally without interesting parts, so if you'd like to read it, too, the full text of the novel can be found for free at Project Gutenberg or Amazon.com.

I just started reading another book that I'm not sure if I'll get through called Excuse Me!, but whether I finish it or not, I'll be here to complain about it soon! Until then, I hope that all of you have a nice week and find lots of interesting things to read.