Sweet Surrender
By Rachel Morrissey

Could an electronic word-keeper ever replace her beloved books?  Rachel tells of her surprising conversion from the page to the screen..

have a new love.  

And I think this one is for keeps.  Well… until a newer, irresistible model comes out.  

I have a Kindle.

Please don’t start with how you could never read a book on a machine. 

As soon as anyone notices that I am reading on my Kindle, they are intrigued, curious as monkeys, and then they hand it back and begin to pontificate on how they could never give up books.   They go on and on about the tactile experience of the turning the page, anticipating what wonders the next sentence will bring, and how they are totally convinced that the experience could never be matched by a contemptuous computer. 

It isn’t that I don’t appreciate the sentiment.  I myself love the feel and smell of books.  The smell of printed paper, crackled leathers, worn cotton-and-linen bindings can be intoxicatingly transporting.  You can almost feel the adventure that awaits between the covers.  And in my life, two places I have loved to spend time are bookstores and the library.  Back when they had books, that is. 

Summer was particularly lovely at the library.  Wandering the stacks and feeling the spines of the books and smelling the musty old pages, I would get lost in a quest to discover new people and places.  I liked the way they lined up, creating peaks and valleys in the stacks that I could get lost in, and have to climb my way out.  Sometimes I just had to scale the shelf to see about a book at the top, risking life or at least limb, and doing that on row after row.  Then I would struggle to pick out six or seven to take, until next week, when I would get to come back and wander again, and wonder what else I could find.  The library was cozy and mysterious, and yet so beautifully and categorically organized. If you had a question, you knew where to look, or if you liked a book, you could always find more by the same author.  (In fact, I like the Dewey decimal system so much that my home library is catalogued and alphabetized.)  Every summer, I would sign up for the summer reading program, and by the end of the summer, I had often read more books than anyone else.  And you know what the prize was?  A book. 

I took home copies of  Bed Knobs and Broomsticks,  A Wrinkle in Time,  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,  and Robinson Crusoe, all of which I adored and are still on my parents’ bookshelves.  I loved to read outside, laying in the grass in my backyard or in-between innings at a baseball game.  I still love to read outside.

Later, at college, the library was the gathering place.  On winter nights, too frozen for fun outside, the library would quietly hum, brightly alive with students studying—and avoiding studying.  When my brain just couldn’t fit one more piece of bio-chem and I just stopped caring about the contributions of the Napoleonic wars to the conflicts of the 20th century, I could wander the stacks, looking at forgotten doctoral dissertations and scanning (again) through the list of books that had been banned in the United States, wondering which I would choose to read next.  The best part was that now a lot of people were wandering those stacks, and if I was lucky, I could have just as many adventures as I did as a kid and maybe run into a few more grown-up adventures while I climbed the shelves, just to see which books were way up top. 

But now, bookstores barely smell like books.   They smell like cappuccinos, plastic wrap, and scratch-and-sniff tchochkies that are sold by the barrel.   And libraries are strangely dust-free so as to protect the computers that went from being in a “lab” to being the central attraction. I have walked into a couple of modern libraries and had to ask where they keep the books, only to have some punk kid with hair in his eyes roll them at me and point to the far corner of the building.   No climbing necessary at these libraries.  The stacks barely stack up.  And if you happen to meet someone at the library, it is just as likely that they are looking something up on the Internet as finding something to read.  Kindred spirits are no longer as common.  

And in saying all of this, I sound like a crotchety old fuddy-dud, but then, who is the one with the Kindle?  Hmmmm?   I have given in to the impulse of the homogenized efforts of Barnes and Noble and just let it be.  I have surrendered.  I have embraced the future and I have to say, it feels GREAT! 

I usually have to carry a large purse to accommodate my stuff and the two or three books that I am always lugging around.   Now, I have downsized and my shoulders love me for it.   I carry this lovely light little thing I can read from at anytime, anywhere, and it carries thousands of pages for me.   Last winter, I was reading War & Peace.  The volume was huge to lug around, and looked a wee bit pretentious.  Now, no one but me knows what I am reading, and I am not having carpal tunnel problems by holding the book too long.  The best part about owning a Kindle came when a friend recommended a book and I immediately took out my Kindle, searched, found it, and downloaded it in a minute flat.  It was marvelous.  It combined the satisfaction of kindred sharing with the thrill of instant gratification.  Only this wasn’t a greasy burger or some lamp-warmed fries.  This was a book!  No guilt, no calories, no question one of my favorite things.  

People may say I have given up on the bookstores and libraries, but I feel like they gave up on me.  They changed first.  I will still go there to wander and ponder and to find the books that I really want on my shelves.  But for the beach read, the park bench lunch, the train ride, the long trips with luggage limits, and for day-to-day fun, I have found a new love.  And maybe that love will lead me to other kinds of adventures, other kindred souls.  Or at least to fellow gadget geeks who have embraced the inevitable.