A few years ago, my dad
bought an e-reader. My father is a voracious reader and he was more than
a little excited. Like everything in his life, he researched it forward
and backwards. You want to know the specs on every reader on the market in
2009? He's your guy. My Dad would try to convince anyone he met about the
benefits of this new fangled reader, including me. And I swore up and
down, that I didn't care how many bookshelves from Ikea I had to buy and then
get someone else to assemble, I would never, ever have an e-reader. I
don't care how many trees it saves. A mighty pine would gladly give his
life for the written word, it is the most noble deed a pine can perform.
I would hold out to the end, technology would not win. Just because
something is new and exciting, does not mean it is better. Nothing can
replace a physical book, or the intimacy that comes with its reading. I don't
care how fancy they make it, it is not the same. It.is.not.the.same.
Today, I bought an
e-reader. Sorry, Dad.
Here's the thing, I kind of
love my new e-reader. It makes accessing and reading books a breeze.
It also feels like I'm cheating. It's not just the stories and the
words that I love. It's the actual physical book. The promise of an
unopened cover. The comfort of a well worn spine. I love seeing the
scribbles in the margins, the underlining and circling of passages that stirred
the soul. The musty sweet smell of a well read book. I love the creasing of the
spine, dog eared pages, The crayon scrawls of a child across the pages. The
beautiful inscription of the gift giver to the reader. The physical object of
the book itself is a story. And it makes my heart ache that we are losing
that.
As a child, we visited the
library almost as regularly as we did our church. We would trek in every
week, check out the maximum 12 books, and head home. We were read to
every day. We'd curl up every evening in my brother's bed and my father
would read us story, after story, after story. We'd beg for "just
one more, Daddy, please! Then we promise to go to sleep!" And my
father usually obliged. When he was at work the next day, my brother and
I would sort through our borrowed books, selecting the stories for that night's
reading. The next week, we'd drive back into town, return the last 12
books, and find another dozen to bring home with us. Of course we had our
favourites, that we checked out over and over again. I'm sure we are
responsible for the wearing out of a few good books at our public library.
When I was 10 or 11 years
old, my father and I found a copy of "The Last of the Mohicans" on a
bookshelf in my grandparents house. It had been given to my great
grandmother as a gift from her teacher after completing the seventh grade.
(I know this, because it is inscribed in elegant cursive on the inside
cover). I never met my great grandmother. She left this world
decades before I entered it. But somehow I felt connect to her when I
held that book. I imagined her holding it, carrying it home with her down
the gravel road to her parent's homestead. I imagined her curled up on a
winters night in front of the wood stove, devouring it, page after page.
Picking it up ever couple of years to relive the adventures along the
Huron. Maybe she didn't. Maybe she put it on a shelf when she got home
from school that day and never touched it again. Or maybe she read it,
and hated it. I don't know. But what I do know, is that Laurena
Hatfield held the red, canvas bound novel in 1906, when she was just a girl.
And nearly a century later her great granddaughter, at almost the exact
same age, would be in the house where she gave birth to her children, holding
that same book, her hands touching the exact same object. Although separated
by three generations, and 100 years, we shared a moment together. And I
want that for my grandchildren, my great grandchildren. I want my
children and grandchildren to look at my bookshelf and feel my presence despite
my absence, when they hold a book that I once held, to read the words that I
once read.
Poet Taylor Mali
said "We need words to hold us and the
world to behold us for us to truly know our own souls." It is
in between the covers of those childhood books that I found by soul, it is in
between the pages of stories now, that I am continuing to find my voice.
When I'm anxious, or
overwhelmed, I go to a bookstore and spend hours wandering about. You can find
me on the floor, usually in the children's section, reading page after page,
until I am grounded again. I have a relationship with books.
Confession: I have cried, while sitting on the floor of a local
bookstore, reading The Velveteen Rabbit, as an adult. This is what books do to
me.
And I get it. The
e-reader thing. I get the appeal. It's light weight. It simplifies
things. It's convenient. I spent hours trying to track down books that
evidently do not exist in this town of mine, and would cost a great deal in
shipping to get them to my door. Even then, they would not arrive by the time I
needed them. But thanks to technology, one click, and I own a copy.
An electronic copy. That I can see, but never touch. Thanks
to this digital device, books are more accessible, and that's a good thing,
right? I had 10 books I wanted to take on vacation with me, that would have
been a full carry-on worth of books, but now, they are all contained on a
device "no thicker than a pencil" that can fit in my purse (or my
pocket as the advert said, but whoever wrote that obviously hasn't had lady pockets-useless
things that they are). I'm saving money on books (and the shipping of
them) And I don't hate it as much as I thought I would. But it's not the
same. it.is.not.the.same. It is practical. And it breaks my heart.
Tweet
No comments:
Post a Comment