A few notes on Kindle, color, and collecting

A few years ago, I discovered the joy of arranging my books by color. While many bookish sorts are horrified by this notion, I love the garish chaos: Joyce Carol Oates’ hot pink Blonde cuddles with a magenta Joy of Pregnancy, and tangerine Guns, Germs and Steel is flanked by day-glow Midnight’s Children and Chinese red The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Sort your books by color and patterns emerge that you never noticed before: books about travel are often blue; histories often some combination of red, orange, and yellow; green books are rare. 

I love what the disorderly palimpsest of dated favorites and recent acquisitions says about how my tastes have changed over the years:  Nicholson Baker’s now quaint black dust-covered Vox (1993) bunks with navy Betsy Ross and the Making of America (2010). In my twenties, I consumed contemporary American fiction almost exclusively, but the older I get, the more I prefer to read about eras and places I can never experience firsthand. Why read it when I live it? Still, each spine is a breadcrumb indicating where my brain has been.

See? Arranging your books by color is cool!

Our bookshelves chart our intellectual histories, and I’m vain about mine. When my husband and I first moved in together several years ago, it was a hard pill to swallow – I didn’t particularly like pollutant titles like The Firm and zombie anthologies mingling with my literary fiction, and truth be told I thought about asking if our books could keep separate quarters. But I had to concede that his dictionary collection was worthy. I will be the first to admit that our bookshelves – yes, his and mine -- are tantamount to cerebral exhibitionism: Look how smart we are, they call, uttering the unspeakable. We might not have found fame and fortune, but damn, we have read a lot.

But this past Christmas, I got a Kindle, joining the estimated 5 million others who trumpet taps for the codex. It’s was a matter of practicality at that point, I told myself: often when I was in the thick of research and a certain book was just what I needed, I didn’t have the patience or the time to go to the library or the bookstore. My brain is trained by Wikipedia; I want knowledge in an instant.  Then there was the space problem. Our bookshelves overflow, and stacks of books lurk under tables and in corners. Sometime last fall I cleared 30 books out from under my bed, where they had migrated, seemingly of their own accord, from my bedside table. 

Kindle vs. iPad

When it came to the Kindle versus iPad debate, I rewarded Amazon for what Kindle has done for my father. When he was in his forties, my father, a voracious reader of smart thrillers and history, was diagnosed with macular degeneration, an eye disease that causes blurred vision and can lead to blindness. Books suddenly vanished from his bedside table and television colonized evenings. My father, the man who had read each volume of Churchill’s history of World War II, was reduced to filling 7:30 to 11 with fuzzy impressions of Miami Vice. Hazy versions of Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! were weekly godsends. 

After surgery that restored at least some of his eyesight, my father could struggle through large-print editions from the local library, a few pages at a time, but the library only carried lowbrow in large print. My father read The DaVinci Code and its ilk out of desperation -- for more than 30 years. And because the reflective glare of most computer screens is too hard on his eyes, the Internet Age passed him by. Still, even though reading it himself was a struggle, every Sunday morning he went into town to buy the Sunday Times.

But then a year and a half ago my husband suggested that we spurge and buy my father a Kindle DX – the big kind, large as a hardback. We held our breath as my father opened the package – a device that could restore reading to my father was too much to hope for. 

The Kindle waved a magic wand over my father: because he could adjust the print size and the screen didn’t reflect, he instantly became the reader he was supposed to be. He ploughed through more books in a year than he had in the past 30, among them Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War, the Stieg Larsson Millenium trilogy, the Soviet-era serial killer thriller Child 44, David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War. The Kindle restored my father to his rightful place among readers, and it improved his quality of life by a thousand fold. 

Perhaps I also wanted to reward Kindle for the incendiary brilliance of the product name. Were the marketing gurus who christened it fully aware of Kindle’s many complex subtexts? Sure, books light fires in all of us and warm our souls, but think of the countless unknowns who were burned at the stake for reading, for allowing what they read to transform their beliefs, or of the thousands of books that have gone up in flames, either in deliberate book burnings, torching of monasteries in Tudor England, or the firestorm that destroyed the Alexandrian library in 48 BC. How fitting that a device called the Kindle is laying siege to the tradition of the codex. 

But still I fussed. What would happen to swapping books, the intimate joy of turning the very same pages that a friend has savored? And down the line, what would happen at parties, if there weren’t any bookshelves where shy people like me, who don’t like washing dishes, can discreetly take refuge?

I’ve some time on the elegiac site Bookshelf Porn, a photoblog of bookshelf photos. It feels faintly like looking at pictures of graveyards – graveyards of the soon-to-be-dead. Before I got my Kindle, I thought about taking photographs of my bookshelves, just for myself, to mark when the parade of colors would grind to a halt: December 2010.

Six months later…

Last winter, my Kindle felt like one of most significant purchases I’ve ever made – imbued with far more meaning than any car or pair of fabulous boots, up there with, say, buying my son’s crib.

But it turns out it’s not really that big of a deal – I only read SOME books on my Kindle. Print books still find their way into my life in all sorts of ways, like the “rescue” my husband and I did a few months ago of about 50 books that my in-laws planned on taking to a used book store, or books people give me, or books I simply decide I would rather have in print. Even for research, it’s often better I find to have print the better to scribble notes in and dog ear. If I think I need to go back and reread something or reference it, better not to have my Kindle. 

To me, e-books are not the other way to read – they are just another way to read. The bloom of my bookshelves might be minorly stunted by my Kindle, but I’m not worried.