2018 Notes to Myself: No. 1

For the last two or three years,

I've done Notes to Myself

in lieu of those all-too-meaningless

New Year Resolutions.

Ordinarily,

I post them one-a-day

during the month of January,

but I wanted to participate in 

Susannah Conway's Gentle January meme,

so this year I'm posting in February.

This is a prescription 

that I won't have any hesitation in following.

I am an unabashed bibliophile.

I love to read

and be enthralled by a captivating story.

Or, for that matter,

to learn something new,

to be exposed to divergent points of view,

and sometimes

to be awed -- not by words --

but by stunning photographs.

After I sold the house I'd shared with my spouse

(now the spouse of someone else)

and bought a much more modest home of my own,

I donated hundreds of books to the local library

for its annual book sale. 

I kept hundreds, perhaps over a thousand, more

and had to pack and move them.

I also had to buy bookshelves,

since all the custom bookcases of the old house

were suddenly unavailable.

That got me thinking about a Kindle.

It would be much easier to move

1000 books

stored on a Kindle or in the cloud

than ones that I hold in my hand,

I thought.

For the first time, I could find a justification

for abandoning hold-in-my-hand books

or so I thought.

I bought a Kindle

and began to order books of interest.

What I found

is that I'm perfectly content

reading a good novel or memoir on my device.

I love the ease of sticking it in my handbag

and carrying it with me 

so I can read while I wait for a friend

to join me for lunch,

or before a movie starts,

or in bed at night without a lamp.

They work fine at the beach

and are great on a long flight

because they take up almost no space

in a carry on bag

and you've always got new titles to open

if you finish a book 

and don't know how to survive

the next six hours

without something to read because

you can't imagine having to converse

with the unkempt guy in the next seat.

Non-fiction, however, is another thing altogether.

I've tried it and have stopped buying

virtual non-fiction.

Books about history or ideas or politics

or brain science

have to be held in my hands

and pages turned, one by one.

Otherwise, it's too hard to flip back

to re-read a passage that might disagree

with or undercut something I just read.

And I find it less burdensome to mark 

a dazzling quote or section I want to 

return too with a sticky tab

than to highlight it and try to find it again.

And, let's face it, 

a lot of content available on Kindle

is rubbish.

There's too much content you'd never buy

if you were in a brick and mortar bookstore

and could turn back the cover and

test read for a page or two.

And it's hard to tell from the description

and sometimes even reader-submitted "reviews"

because. . . well, for all kinds of reasons.

So I'm happy with my hybrid approach --

Kindle for fiction and reading convenience.

Books with heft and paper with good weight

and beautiful layout and type

and that lovely new book smell

for everything else.

No matter what format,

I certainly will follow my own advice

and indulge.