I grew up in houses full of books.  Book shelves are as fundamental to my sense of home as pictures on the walls.  When I visit a friend, I head to the bookcase, and imagine moving in for a weekend so I can read her books.  When Iris and I, both single mothers, decided to share a house, I was thrilled to see that she had an almost empty bookcase, then dismayed to discover that she considered books clutter, and used the shelves for ornaments and organizing.

My husband is resigned to my clutter, and he himself has shelves of natural history books, but he was pleased when I spent the first week of my retirement reducing the collection by a third.  (Thus making room for more books.)   With less money, I did resolve to rely more on the library, but I still have little bursts of book-buying, and my family gives me books for Christmas. I try to keep the collection culled by giving away anything that isn’t a keeper.
                       
I always pack books when I travel.  I like to take books about the place I’m going, and a fat Victorian novel for a vacation from the vacation.  One is not enough.  Suppose I don’t like it, or worse, suppose I finish it.  Once, alone in Nova Scotia, I found myself on a Sunday with nothing to read.  The only store open in Cheticamp was a drugstore, with a tiny book rack of mostly junk.  I found an Agatha Christie, but it was a quick read, not nearly enough to fill the tired hours after morning hikes, and the long nightly stretches of insomnia.

MY B&B IN BADDECK, NOVA SCOTIA HAD A BOOKCASE

 
L'ACADIEN TRAIL NEAR CHETICAMP: GREAT VIEWS AND MOOSE TURDS, BUT NO BOOKS

When I travel by car, books are no problem – even for a weekend I have two or three in my tote bag.  By air, with a small suitcase, it’s more of a challenge.  In France I had a used paperback of Les Miserables, torn into five sections for easy portability in my purse, though I had to overcome a lifetime of training to mutilate a book.

An e-reader is the obvious solution, but I am a technophobe.  I hate new gizmos.  I grumbled when I had to learn to use a computer for work. Answering machine, cell phone, digital camera – I could write an essay about my long resistance and eventual submission to each of them.

So I bought a Kindle before our trip to South Africa with great reluctance.  First I borrowed my stepdaughter Leah’s for a couple of days, to see how I liked it.  I was amused to see what an ambitious and improbable collection of free books she had downloaded, including War and Peace, and the complete works of Shakespeare and Dickens.  I read a few pages of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I didn’t know whether it was the Autobiography or the Kindle that I liked, but I went ahead and bought one anyway.  And I discovered the appeal and peril of the Kindle.

First, I downloaded a list of free books for Kindle, and a list of free children’s books.  Then I went shopping.  I’d never read any Wilkie Collins – I downloaded the The Woman in White and the Moonstone. Willa Cather’s My Antonia.  Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities. To my shame, Virginia Woolf’s fiction has always been beyond me.  I decided to give her another try, and downloaded Night and Day. For Amanda’s bedtime story I found Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, E. Nesbit, L. Frank Baum, and Hans Christian Andersen.

A character in The Moonstone uses The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe as his guide in all situations; it’s free on Kindle.  The Moonstone plot turns on opium, so I found Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.  I’d always heard Edward Gibbon was the great prose stylist of the 18th century, so I got all six volumes of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Now I understood Leah’s collection.

Everything had been free so far, and though I may never read the Gibbon, no harm done.  Then I went on a spree.  I had already read a lot of non-fiction about South Africa, but fiction illuminates a place in a way non-fiction can’t.  I bought thirteen contemporary South African novels.  Amanda is a reluctant reader, but loves anything with a screen. Ten easy-reading children’s books.  I flew off to Johannesberg with nineteen novels and fifteen children’s books in my purse (not to mention Gibbon).

I loved the Kindle, and delighted in its special features. With one click I can look up almost any word in the New Oxford Dictionary. I can highlight and store passages that appeal to me. I can search a word, which helps when a minor character whom I’ve forgotten reappears.  I often mis-lay a book when I’m in the middle of it, and wander the house trying to find it.  If I remember to put my Kindle back in its garish neoprene cover, it stands out wherever I leave  it.

 
MY HIGHLY VISIBLE KINDLE

Buying books on Kindle is easier than ordinary internet shopping.  It may be too easy.  When I hear of a book on NPR, or read a review in the New Yorker, I am much more likely to buy it.  Most of these are happy impulses.  I’ve read a fascinating account of two teachers in Colorado at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a warm and witty novel about a widowed British colonel and an Indian shop-keeper in Sussex. click  click  Nothing I buy is very expensive, but even in 2011 ten bucks is ten bucks, and though I never finished the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, I still believe a penny saved is a penny earned..

So I traveled around in South Africa and Swaziland, with a book always available for me and for Amanda, and thought I would write an essay in praise of my Kindle.  And then we came home.  Blissfully I sat in my ancient La-Z-Boy, early in the morning, lamp over my left shoulder, coffee beside me.  Home at last.  I reveled in the familiar sights, sounds and smells (we DO have a dog), and I looked over at the bookcase.  

Every book I saw called up memories – not only of its contents, but of where and who I was when I read it.  Books are the most reliable companions, more constant than a lover, less trouble than a dog.  But my memories of books are inseparable from their physical presence.  The cover entices me, and the book designer’s choices about typography and placement and proportion become part of the reading. click

When I read a book on Kindle, the design disappears.  All the technical challenges and choices that permit a book to fly through space and arrive on my Kindle within moments of my request are invisible.  The author’s words come to me unmediated, and there’s something exciting about that.  But a book on Kindle is like a phone conversation instead of a visit.
                                       
I wouldn’t give up my Kindle; there’s nothing like it for travel.  Still, when I’m home, I’ll choose the serendipity of a trip to the library or book store, or the familiar volumes that have comforted and nourished me all my life.

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