Jeff Gomez

Jeff Gomez
E-books: Reading Like It’s 1999

In a classic, 19th-century short story, Washington Irving’s character Rip Van Winkle wakes up after being asleep for 20 years to find that the world has changed all around him. People he loved, including his wife, are no longer alive, and the country itself has—in the intervening two decades—gone through the massive trauma and upheaval of the Civil War. For Rip Van Winkle, it seems like only a few peaceful hours have passed; all he did was close his eyes. But in what seemed to him a short amount of time, everything around him had irrevocably changed.