face it: she is too fond of books
While I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself as bookish, I do enjoy reading. Actually, I think I have a penchant for collecting books, rather than for reading itself – my “to read” pile is about ten books high and growing. I just like books – crisp new ones, musty old ones, tattered sad-looking ones. Also, I tend to go through “Forget about romance! I’m just going to get really into reading!” phases about every ten months, which unfortunately don’t ever last as long as I intend them to.
However, I did read plenty of books during my recent stint in Japan – on trains; at restaurants, to act as a buffer for the fact that I was a foreigner eating alone; late at night while cradling a chu-hi (a stupidly cheap mixed drink in a can). I blazed through so many titles that when it came time to pack up my apartment and throw out anything that wouldn’t fit into my suitcase, I was faced with an age-old dilemma.
Books are heavy. They are not the ideal thing to stuff into a suitcase, especially a suitcase that you have to lug around in transit for 24 hours. However, they are also easy to get attached to, and worth (as I later found out) practically nothing when traded in, especially in a non-English-speaking country. Alternatively, it seems so sad and practically sacrilegious to throw them away – unlike my giant pink Rilakkuma pillow, which I could easily rationalise putting in the garbage pile (but only because I kept the blue one).
My conclusion was to ship said books home – in a giant box, which I lugged myself from my apartment to the post office near the train station, which was a fairly long walk in sweltering conditions. I spent the whole trek cursing my decision to get into Stephen King novels and wishing that all books were printed on feathers. The things I do as an unashamed hoarder.
Anyway, this brings me to the point of this piece – e-book readers. I would not have had this problem if I had been using an e-book reader. However, this whole e-book thing really has me torn, quite frankly. On the one hand, travelling with books is a pain. I certainly didn’t delight in my half an hour of dragging along 20kg of paper, or even lugging a book around on the train each morning, for that matter. An e-book reader certainly seems like it would have been a nice alternative – light and easy to carry, but capable of holding many wondrous titles.
However, e-book readers have always seemed a bit impersonal to me – so small and flimsy, not at all what I consider reading to be about. Reading off a screen just isn’t for me – I like the heft of a book, flipping the pages, bending back the cover (which I know some people hate). E-book readers just seem like they don’t quite fit in your hands properly – too thin or something.
That said, I can’t deny that for travel they make the most sense. One of the perils of travelling is that you often have lots of time to read, but it’s even less practical to carry loads of books around. Also, my personal comfort read is the Harry Potter series – pretty much the most annoyingly hefty series to want to have around. Don’t even get me started on guidebooks – I think Lonely Planet Japan is the reason I now have one shoulder that’s higher than the other.
So maybe, when it comes to this e-book business, I’m just being an old-fashioned snob. Truth is, I’ve never really tried to read a book on an iPad or e-book reader before. They do make a lot more sense in many ways, so maybe I just don’t like the idea of it. I think it’s one of those things where I just find them weird, almost for no reason – kind of like how ferrets are weird but I can’t exactly explain why. A part of me does just like picking books up off shelves at the bookstore, or stacking them in “to read” piles. I stick by books – even though sometimes I get gum stuck between the pages, and even though they’re stupidly heavy. But maybe I’ll change my mind one day, before books turn my brain.
