On books and kindling

Over at Amazon.com these days, you'll find offers on a little gizmo called Kindle. It's an "amazing wireless reading device," and Amazon promises you "over" 200,000 titles and something that looks and reads like real paper. One big-time reviewer is blurbed as having said, "This is the future of book reading." It is currently sold out.

On the home front, my father-in-law, who is a major patron of libraries in big, monetary ways, has gone to conferences at which the warnings are dire. Paper books are coming to an end. It will all be electronic. It's good though! they assure us. It's saving trees!

I believe it. I believe it saves trees, although it is, still, electronics and electronics manufacturing on its own is a messy, polluting business.

I just don't believe any of the rest of it. I refuse.

I've already made clear on here how deeply I believe in the importance of reading. Even a logorrheic like me can find it hard to articulate all the reasons that reading is so essential. But lying in my bed on a rare lazy Sunday yesterday, looking around my bedroom at the many bookshelves, laden with hundreds of books that have comforted me like nothing else can during my worst times, turning my head to see the several stacks on my bedside table, the several stacks on my husband's bedside table, I suddenly became able to articulate quite clearly why Real. Books. Still. Matter.

Do you remember your childhood? Mine had many memorable aspects, but one that never changes with the perspective of age and time is the way I spent it looking at books. I would browse my parents bookshelves, sometimes for hours. It was a good time for book jackets in the 1970s--lurid, highly colored or abstractly bizarre--and it's no lie to say that I often would select a book based simply on its cover. Among the hundreds, probably thousands, of books my parents had--I never had to go to a library to research anything even in those pre-Internet days--there were titles I saw again and again, titles that stay with me to this day, playing like a visual record of book binding in my head.

Look Homeward Angel. Cien Años de Soledad. The World According to Garp. The Frogs. World Religions. The Agony and the Ecstasy. Les Miserables. Pride and Prejudice. Jude the Obscure. Ulysses. Robert and Elizabeth Browning. George Washington. A Latin primer. Shakespeare. Greek mythology. Books of history, biography, literature, science. And on and on. What a pleasure just to browse on a lonely, quiet day, to reach out and abstract an intriguing volume, to turn it over, feel its age, its woven binding, the crispiness of fragile yellowed paper, to see the type, turn a page, many pages, to get lost inside its world.

Had I not had those tangible, captivating book covers with their mysterious yet somehow meaningful titles there, literally at my fingertips, attracting my young mind, drawing me in and teasing my curiosity...well, I really do shudder when I think about the void that would have been without them. What if all my parents had lying there in that house, what if all I could see as I look around my bedroom today, what if all there were for me to reach for as my greatest comforters--what if it were all collated, coldly, electronically, invisibly, lying trapped within a grey, comfortless, handheld device called Kindle? Is this the chilly fate of future generations? Is this all they will have to ponder on a lonely, quiet Sunday afternoon?

It's a prospect that leaves me cold.