Light My Fire

So, I like to think I'm still a hold-out. I still pause to bury my nose in the smell of whatever book I'm reading, new and old alike. Bookstores both soothe me and make me slightly manic (as all the best addictions do, I imagine, at one stage or another). Some of my fondest memories of college are sitting in the absolute silence of the Grad Library stacks, getting gloriously distracted from the books I meant to find for my thesis amid the walls of books, the ranks of buckram spines, the pop of a new publication, the grab of an odd title in the corner of my eye. All this is to say that I feel deeply (if resignedly) about books as physical books. I love them in a way that I don't think they can be loved if you separate the words from the paper, glue, string, old annotations, spots, signs of care or carelessness, slow fading, decay.

However, Jake got me a Kindle for Chanukah. He likes books qua books, too, if only because he is a piler by nature, but he also makes a slight fetish of efficiency in spatial dynamics. Since the baby was born he has railed about the sheer amount of stuff that we have to pack to go anywhere for any period of time, and especially to go for a week or more (this railing is mostly inward, I should note, except in those exquisitely frustrating moments intrinsic to traveling -- which are, incidentally, the times in my life that I least want to discuss our penchant for overpacking). I generally take six to eight (to, ahem, ten) hardback library books on just about any trip that requires a plane, and Jake would have spent more than $189 to eliminate that weighty inefficiency. Also, we had a warm moment on a commuter train in New York this fall, me reading Stephen Ambrose's The Victors aloud to him from a sample on my Droid, as we rocked from Katonah back to the city, the baby asleep on the seat across from us.

So I just finished reading my first ever Kindle book: Lily Burana's I Love a Man in Uniform. I can't quite get over the fact that I've now read a book that I've never seen or touched (some distinction seems to be required now, right? A conceptual book vs. a physical book? Oy vey.) You don't really realize how much reading a book is a physical experience until you're reading a "book" (can someone please make a decent distinction here stat). It's delightful, but bizarre, not to have to hold the book open with your hand or the blanket or the edge of a plate, to be able to turn the page with the tiny motion of any smallish and reasonably coordinated body part. It's bizarre and not delightful not to be able to flip pages past your finger to find something you half-remember, and when you do find it, it's highly disconcerting to find it on a different part of the page from where you remember seeing it (I have a weird, and fairly useless, version of photographic memory where I can visualize what quadrant of a two-page spread a quote or fact I've read can be found; the last time I recall this making a major impact on my life was on U.S. history tests in high school).

I'm sure there'll be more on this later.

The Victors so far: I'm not sure Ambrose isn't plagiarizing himself, but we liked it the first time so hey.

I Love a Man in Uniform: Quick, enjoyable prose by a mostly sympathetic memoirist, writing about two experiences that fascinate me (stripping, which she writes about a little, and being married to the military, which she writes about a lot). I don't know about her "PTSD" freakout, but this happened in the book around the same time that I Googled the author's picture, and for some reason I liked her less after seeing it, so maybe I was just feeling ornery about that. Does this happen to other people? Discuss. Anyway, after reading this I would/will read her first memoir about stripping, I think.