people say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading

January 11: holus-bolus

One of my good friends from way-way-way back has been talking about the relative ease with which he could put a fork in 'normal', so to speak, and derail (to restart) his life holus-bolus. While I question both his methods and his reasoning, I'm starting to think that the general concept - periodic reevaluation and prehaps sweeping change - is sound.

February 11: vaunted

That the newest iteration of this innovative software has been so highly vaunted is no surprise to me; the comparison to what we currently use reminds me of the old (and true) joke: Windows 95 = Mac 87.

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    I've always been a reader. For as far back as I can remember, any spare moment (and probably the majority of those 'unspare' moments, too, when I should've been doing something else...) was spent reading, searching for something to read, rereading, talking about reading, writing, writing about reading, or thinking about reading or writing. Words and stories are an integral part of who I am. Maybe they are the most integral part of me, in fact. Maybe the rest of me wouldn't exist at all, now that I think about it, if I weren't tied together with thoughts and memories and feelings about what I've read, want to read, and want to write woven around and through.
     Paper, I thought, was necessary for this process. Tangibility. The weight of the book in my hand. The texture of the pages, the edge at my fingertips as I finish the page and maintain the thought while I turn it, breathless (always holding my breath while I turn the page - doesn't everyone?), rushing as I start the next.  The scent. The oppressiveness and expense of hardcover, with the benefit of staying open so much more nicely in the process. The cheapness of mass market paperbacks (16-19 cm tall - the back-pocket size you can buy at the drugstore), with the drawback of flimsiness and a tendency to look worn before they've been read through once - but also that much easier to block open with an elbow or something on the desk while I'm eating, without fearing too much for the binding. My personal preference: trade paperback (generally: softcover, the width of a hardcover but shorter [19-23 cm], bound more flexibly than mass market). In the middle, price-wise, between hardback and mass. Built for rereading. They can take a lot of use and still look as good as the day they rolled off the press.
     Where does the e-reader (by which I mean a book on an electronic device of any kind, be it reading on a desk- or laptop computer, netbook or notepad, smartphone, or dedicated e-reader) fit into all this? Well...
     When I'm asked for my opinion about something I haven't read and have zero interest in reading - and, in fact, think is a complete waste of brain cells - my response is often an equivocal, "Anything that gets people reading is a good thing." That is the gist of the answer I've given when asked about e-readers for the past couple of years. Why? Well...
     They're basically single-use, and I'm not an enthusiastic fan of single-use technology. I have several sets of miniature tartlet pans, bread pans, Bundt cake pans, and muffin tins. I have a machine that can only be used to make a Swedish dessert called Krumkake. I have the much-maligned popover pan (which can, naturally, only be used for popovers). In the kitchen, it sometimes makes sense...but, yeah, lots of times it doesn't, and if there were a way to make decent popovers in a muffin pan, I wouldn't have both. That's why I'm so sensitive to the concept of having a machine that will do one thing, and one thing only: contain a book that I'm reading. (Yes, I see the irony: each book that I have contains itself and none other, and I'm not complaining about that. We'll argue the need to acquire another day.) So unless I was going to buy a new laptop, a netbook or notepad, or a smartphone, I was highly unlikely to acquire an e-reader for myself.
     Therefore, it seemed ridiculous to either learn more about, or get attached to the idea of one day having, something that I couldn't afford. So I let myself spurn the entire concept and have basically tried to remain above the fray, letting my friends (some of whom cannot help but be embroiled in it, because of the jobs they do) muck about in it.
     This is all way it was such a genuine surprise when, for Christmas, someone who knows me very, very well (yes, in this, even better than I know myself) sent me a Kindle and a bunch of books for it, too. From the moment I'd torn the paper from the box, it was obvious that I'd been fooling myself for a long time: I was beyond thrilled. Books, anyway, are such an awesome present, and that many at once - W00T! But beyond that: he knew. He knew that I really wanted it, that I was too stubborn to say so, that I was too stubborn and stupid to get it for myself. And so, here it is.
     And what do I think of it?
     I like it a lot. I've finished the first book that I started that first night, and have moved on to another in the same series - they're fantasy novels, so they take longer for me than the typical books that I roar through without maybe thinking about so closely. There are some aspects about reading with/from/by (? whatever) the Kindle that are particularly nice. Some would apply to any e-reader, I'm sure, while some are probably only appropriate to my experience with this particular model. For instance...
     It stays "open" to a page without actually being held, regardless of where I am in the book. For someone who tends to read while doing other things (e.g. eating, drinking, writing, watching TV, talking, changing toenail polish, etc.) this is absolutely amazingly terrific. Of course, I'm also super leery of anything happening to it, so I try not to be anywhere near it with food, drink, heavy or ungainly objects (e.g. TV remotes), or caustic substances, rendering nearly everything I've just mentioned moot.
     And I can read it comfortably from a relatively long distance. According to my eye doctor, I "have the eyes of a 28-year-old." By this, I've come to understand, he means that by my current chronological age, most people who use computers as much as I do have already started to experience certain symptoms of illness, injury, and irreversible damage, both to their vision and to the physical makeup of their eyes themselves. I, for some wonderful reason, have remained relatively free of such problems. It is probably a combination of some incidental factors (my insistence on wearing sunglasses practically all the time when I'm outside, any season, in the slightest light; the ratio of white-to-iris in my eyes; the amount of white exposed when my eyes are open normally, which is (if you know me, this is no surprise) abnormally high; the shape of my eyes and the shape of my irises; the distance that I choose to sit from computer monitors at home and at work; and, perhaps most important, the degree of light that I use at home (since what's there at work cannot be controlled by humans). I'd been concerned that I would need to hold an e-reader closer to my eyes, because some phones and laptop screens are difficult to discern at certain distances, but the Kindle is very comfortable and easy to read, just where I want it. When I'm propped up on the couch (with my back to one arm and my legs stretched out) with a pillow in my lap, it's the perfect height and distance on that pillow, a mug of tea on the coffee table next to me, blanket around my legs so my feet don't freeze.
     It's light. Super light. Ridiculously light. I think my phone is heavier. (Probably not, but there are certainly times when it's seemed that way.) The Kindle is comfortable to hold, intuitively designed so that page-turning and menu-following are simple and seamless, and there is an absolute minimum of on-screen activity while reading, so I'm not distracted (or worse) by anything blinking or seemingly out of place.
     I only skimmed the extremely thorough online (i.e. on-device) user's manual - I was far too eager to get started! - so I'm still learning to take advantage of some of the more intricate features, but I know how buy and load books, and how to bookmark, highlight and make notes, which seemed key.
     Reading excessively illustrated books (or books which rely on maps or illustrations, such as the Song of Ice and Fire series!) seems like it would be complicated, to say the least, on any e-reader, mine included. When I read the books, I used Post-It notes to flag the pages that had maps or were the start of the Appendix which listed the Major Houses and their alliances. While bookmarks and notes could be created to 'flag' these pages on the Kindle, I can't imagine that someone with my level of facility in using the notes could flip back and forth with the ease that I did in the books. There are just too many references, too often, to make it seem feasible.
     Another example of this drawback would be a book with a necessary genealogical table, such as Gabriel García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. It's a terrific book (one of the best I've ever read), but without that table to lay out the generations of Buendias, it would make no sense at all - and to go back and forth to the two-page table, scrolling both up-and-down and side-to-side, would be onerous.
     Will I give up my paper books and only read electronically? No, I will not. But will I enjoy the books that I've been given, and get more when I've read these? Definitely! What a great way to save a tree, save some space when traveling, save my back when carrying luggage, save my eyes and my hands, and most of all, to continue to do what I love maybe more than anything else: to read.

[the title quotation is by Logan Pearsall Smith, from Trivia, 1917]