People on my Facebook may have seen this on my status last night — I learned a new word, librocubicularist, which means “someone who reads in bed.”
Because I am an unabashed librocubicularist, I often read in the dark, because I like drifting off to sleep in the middle of a book. In the latter half of 2010, though, my nocturnal reading was severely curtailed (maybe this explains the drop in last year’s reading figures) because I was without a book light for some period of time: my Lumos lightwedge went out of commission (batteries leaked and stuck in the narrow terminals, and their customer service could not give me any advice on how to get them out!); the Really Tiny Book Light turned out to be the Ridiculously (Expensive but) Flimsy Book Light that conked out after a less than a dozen uses; and the lightwedge clone turned out to be, well, a dud.
My book club friends and I were making our rounds of the bargain bookstores one day when I spotted a row of little rectangular boxes on a shelf full of toys and school supplies. It was labeled: Mighty Bright Flex II and when I saw it was a book light at an amazingly low price, I quickly called everyone over and we happily trooped to the counter with at least one box each.