Wait, before I tell you what I’m going to tell you, I first have to tell you this other thing. There’s a restaurant in Oakland called Haven. It has been reviewed and everything, generally favorably, but I had not gotten around to trying it.
Last night all that changed. My heavens, that was a good meal. Not cheap at all, and my January restaurant budget is not large, but man, flavors upon flavors and a pleasant wait staff and all sorts of surprises.
It’s tucked away in the to-be-developed-any-minute-now Jack London Square annex – foot of Webster, basically – and we had to get directions from a passing dog walker even to find it. But there is signage, and perhaps eventually there will be more signage. I dunno.
Anyway, for specialness of occasion and all that, you might want to try it out, even if you don’t live in Oakland. Some tastes are worth a trip.
Anyway, my Kindle died. That’s what I wanted to say. It died at the beginning of a transcontinental plane trip, leaving me with little to read. (Ever read everything in the New Yorker? I mean, the listings and everything? Not as much fun as you might think.)
It died in the middle of “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt. I was bereft. I wanted to finish the story. I also wanted to pass it on to Tracy, but the trouble with a Kindle is that if you pass it on to somebody, you’ve lost your reading device. Whereas if you pass a book on after you’ve read it, you lose nothing at all.
It was kind of a drag on our marriage. She could share books with me, of course, because she was getting books, often from the library. I was getting downloads on a proprietary device. One of the good parts of marriage is sharing enthusiasms; now I couldn’t do that – all thanks to the Kindle, which is now dead.
So I adjusted. I thought about a Kindle Fire and having the complete package, but actually I didn’t want the complete package. I spend enough time on media already; do I really want to check my e-mail in my so-called free time? Well, lots of people do, but not me.
So I began reading books again. I borrowed some from Tracy. Some came in the mail from kindly publishers. And I found the pleasures remarkable; I’m surprised I didn’t miss them more during my Kindle years.
The heft of a book gives heft to the story; the tangibility of a book helps bring the reader closer. Also, you can dart quickly back and forth in a book if you have a question about something. You can sort of do that on a Kindle, but with more effort. You can dog-ear pages from passages that require further contemplation. And the book will be around long after it’s read, in case you want to come back to it.
The prose on a Kindle is stored too, but somehow you don’t go back to it. It vanishes like a chimera in the air, that old book, instantly replaced by a new book in the same location. It’s like a magic trick, but not a particularly pleasing one.
It may be, of course, that one is just more comfortable with the media one grew up using. Of course, 9-year-olds are still reading books; younger kids are having books read out loud to them, and not from a Kindle. There’s something very homey about a book, something very much of the family. “Goodnight Moon” was a member of our household for ever so long.
We still have a copy, just in case. Also “Goodnight Gorilla.” They’re not on a device, they are between covers.
Of course, the book lifestyle is probably insupportable. There are more of us and our need for paper is greater, and books will probably be priced out as a commodity even if our yen for them persists. But I do not have to worry about the future; I can still get books now; that seems unlikely to change in my lifetime.
Other people, the brains trained on other media, can probably get as much grist out of novels on reading devices. May they be well and prosper. But me, I think I’m not going to buy a tablet of any sort. I may be living in an increasingly fragile universe, but there is air here, and something to eat, and people to share books with. That should be enough.
On reading books, eating food and preparing for the future the old-fashioned way.
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