How We Read (part 1)

Reading New BooksFor the holidays, Luisa and I gave each other Kindle Paperwhites from Amazon. We’d been reading on original Kindles for the past three years. It started when it became difficult for Luisa to comfortably manage heavy books and I bought her one. At the time, we lived full-time on our remote farm in the Coastal Hills of Western Sonoma County and the attraction of hearing a book reviewed on Fresh Air that you couldn’t wait to read and then being able to download that same book in minutes was too much to resist. The inability to delay gratification is not the sole province of the young!

I was glad she enjoyed it so much, but I wasn’t sure that I was ready to relinquish the tactile pleasures that have been part of my reading experience since childhood. I don’t suppose it’s still done, but when I was very young, before I could read, my mother put a drop of honey on a page of one of my earliest books and I was allowed to lick it off. The association between books and sweetness lasted ever since. Come to think of it, Mother did a good job of offering up sweet rewards. Sometimes she put M & M’s at the bottom of our milk cups.

My grandfather, “Grandpa Jack”, collected old books on a small scale. Some were first editions of classics and I remember his admonishments about the care I should employ when touching them; turning pages. To hold one of Grandpa Jack’s gilt-edged treasures was like holding a humming bird. I wasn’t allowed to read the books he showed me, but I could inspect them and appreciate their physical beauty.

Electronic Book EnjoymentSeeing how much Luisa enjoyed her Kindle, I gave in and accepted her gift of one. Immediately, I fell in love. I could change the size of the fonts so I could read with or without glasses. I could look up unfamiliar words without finding a dictionary. Sure, these are trivial concerns but since I was giving up one set of pleasures, I was happy to replace them with ones I’d never considered such as changing the style or size of a book’s type or having the book read to me aloud at night or having a dictionary built into the book. I traveled frequently by air the year I started to read on Kindle and imagined that it afforded me much the same kind of enjoyment that train passengers in the late 1800’s must have felt when paperback books first came on the market.

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