An e-book reader in the bound-book world

When I tell people that I own a Kindle, one of their first reactions is usually one of dismissal. "I prefer books," they say, "you know, with paper." It may come as a shock, but yes, I am fairly familiar with traditional reading mediums. And even though I've crossed over to the dark side, I remain a fan of the regular, printed, bound book. I own lots of them. I love to read them. Unfortunately where I live in DC and my current lifestyle doesn't give me a lot of access to them.

I work very long hours and also spend a good deal of time traveling for work. And I live in a neighborhood with no bookstores and no library, which is sad on a number of levels, but that's a discussion best saved for its own post. But despite accidents of geography, employment, and urban planning, I love to read, and I need books and stories to keep me going. They are my lunchtime escapes, my subway ride treats, what relaxes and entertains me no matter where in the world I am or how insane my life has become. John Adams once said that "You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket". I keep a copy of Garrison Keillor's "Good Poems" and "The Essential Poetry Anthology" on my Kindle at all times. They make excellent companions.

But still, I don't think it's healthy to subsist on e-books alone. A good reader keeps a balanced diet. And on Veteran's Day, I was looking for something a little more substantial. Since I was in the Dupont Circle neighborhood for lunch with a friend, I knew where I need to go: Kramerbooks. Kramer's is a famous bookstore/cafe/bar in DC, the first bookstore in the country to ever discover the lucrative combination of cappucinos and hardcovers (meaning they were the first American bookstore to combine a cafe and a bookstore). It remains a thriving, independently owned book mecca, that has a sign posted over the door warning people that they use Kindles, iPads, etc. at their OWN RISK (I kept mine politely tucked inside my bag).

The first thing I notice about a bookstore is the way it smells. A good bookstore should smell strongly like paper and dust, and should have large windows to let in the light (sunlight bakes woodpulp to a proper, ready to read temperature. Undercooked books may be hazardous to your health). Kramer's is such a good bookstore, that the smell literally made me go weak at the knees.

I spent an hour wandering back and forth between the store's two main rooms. Tracing the embossed letters on the covers of new books, checking out what had recently come into paperback, leafing slowly through cookbooks. It was wonderful. One of the things that e-books really lack is the sensory experience of reading. The smell and touch and weight of a book, the shushing sound of pages in motion, all those comforting little feelings that after even a short lifetime of reading I have grown to treasure. As much as I love the world of electronic reading, I hope people will always have bound books and 3-D, human staffed bookstores to turn to.

I ended up picking up a Victorian mystery called "The Meaning of Night", which I am thrilled with. Don't expect a review any time too soon, it's a 700 plus pager and I want to turn each page very, very slowly.

The Irresistible Henry House

The Irresistible Henry House

by Lisa Adler

Random House, 2010

[Note: This review is very long, so if you can't read all the way to the bottom, I wanted to make a plug for my first (and shorter) review of Running the Books by Avi Steinberg]

The Irresistible Henry House was one of the first books I ever read on my Kindle. I bought it for a reason that I was soon to learn was very stupid: Amazon recommended it.

I should have known better. I used to work at an independent bookstore, where I spent hours each day living the drama that is the knowledgeable bookseller against the corporate bookstore/website. If you live near an independent bookstore, take on this piece of advice: use it, treasure it, buy from it. Hypocritical coming from a Kindle owner who gives a significant portion of her income to amazon.com's e-book store? Maybe. There is a certain level of moral surrender that came with getting this device. I love it. But I hate that it means I have to buy books from corporate stores. I hate that there isn't yet a good independent distribution mechanism for e-books. If any readers know of any that I don't know of, tell me about it. And if you read this and you don't do most of your reading on a Kindle, please remember to buy independent. Its important for your communities, for yourself, and for the hard working and under appreciated booksellers of the world. The cultural honor guard that is basically all that stands between us and a world governed by Kim Kardashian tell-alls and Justin Bieber ghost-written picture books.

Basically, if you don't, you will end up reading corporate sponsored and recommended titles like Henry House.

The Bible Project (KMFP #1)

I left my Kindle at home today, I really hate that. When you read regular books, you can keep one stashed into every corner of your life. One by your bedside, one in your briefcase, one in your gym bag. When you have e-books all on one device, if you forget it, you're just stuck with some very long, quiet rides on public transportation.

Now that we are reunited, I can start working on my next post. Please be sure to read my first review, Running the Books by Avi Steinberg (link in the sidebar. Or scroll down).

In the meantime let me announce the first ever Kindle My Fire Book Project! I will be doing these periodically, where I keep a book going on the side of my regular reading for some kind of special challenge.

Right now I am in the midst of "The Bible Project". The goal: Read the entire Bible (King James Translation) from Genesis to Revelation. So far, according to my handy Kindle status bar, I am exactly 5% of the way through the good book. It's one of those "God spake unto Moses" moments, the Jews have departed Egypt and they're starting to get a bit restive, you see. I sense that placating with manna is about to happen.

What have I learned in my 5% journey? So far, the Bible is weird. The "heros" are really nothing of the like. They are frequently angry and mean spirited, and very often it is the cheaters who prosper over the good. There is incest, the stealing of birthrights, murder, forsaking of entire cities and civilizations, famine, death, and through it all stalks the vengeful God, ever ready to punish and generally capricious about his blundering mean spirited little creations.

I've never really read the Bible. Catholics aren't supposed to, that's why we have priests. They read the Bible to you, and then they tell you what it means, you put a dollar in the collection basket, everybody goes home happy. So while I knew from what other people have told me over the years that parts of the Bible were nonsensical, violent, and sexual, I think I had to start reading it for myself to really believe. Let's just say that the first 5% of the Bible was not exactly popular reading at Holy Names Academy (home of Seattle's finest young ladies). But I can't say I'm not enjoying it. The King James language is beautiful, and the stories are starting to move from the truly bizarre to the slightly more inspirational.

Stay posted for updates of biblical proportions, once I reach the 10% mark.

Running the Books

Running the Books
by Avi Steinberg
Doubleday, 2010

Running the Books is one of those stories that you just can't help telling people about. You stop them on the street and without bothering to come up with any conversational foreplay you launch right into an orgiastic description of this fabulous book you're reading. And pretty soon you have them searching in their pockets for a grocery store receipt and a half-dried pen so they can jot down the title and the author.

The author in this case is also the narrator, Avi Steinberg, Harvard educated ex-Orthodox Jew, once a promising Torah scholar yeshiva boy who ends up graduating into a dead-end job writing freelance obituaries for the Boston Globe. That is, until he sees a job posting on Craigslist that changes everything. South Bay prison needs a prison librarian. Competitive pay, union benefits. And that's how a nice Jewish boy ends up as the night shift librarian to a cast of prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, murderers.

Through a series of interlocking short essays, Steinberg opens up the world of prison, with its hierarchies, rules, and small dramas, and invites you in. His best stories focus on the prisoners themselves. Each unique and yet most sharing in a common heritage of crime, addiction, and abuse that eventually led them to the towers of South Bay. The stories of the prisoners are frequently hilarious, I found myself laughing out loud every few pages. Sometimes they are sweet, as when Avi details the love letters he intercepts regularly in the library, stuffed between the pages of books that the convicts use to communicate. Or the description of "sky writing", a sort of pantomime between inmates in the yard and inmates in the towers, enacted through the prison windows. But if there is hope and humor and love in prison, there is also tragedy, either behind or in front of it. Steinberg doesn't blink when he shows us the uglier sides both of the inmates and the American "justice" system. The power trips of guards, the gang disputes from the outside that find there way back into prison, the racial conflicts, the tendency to revert back to criminal behavior on the outside. The librarian sees it all, and so does the reader.

Interspersed with stories of inmates and prison life, are musings on the history and place of prisons in American culture, the building of South Bay prison, which replaced the crumbling 19th century Deer Island prison in Boston, and other subjects. These got a little tiresome after awhile, but I think Steinberg couldn't shake loose that Ivy League impulse to theorize on the anthropological drama around him. I can understand it. I went to college too. So I forgive those parts and eagerly push ahead to read more about Fat Kat, CC Too Sweet, and the women's Creative Writing class, who Steinberg refers to only in the ways that they represent the traits of man as described by Hobbes: Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short. Watch out for Solitary. She's a heart breaker.

What I liked the best about Running the Books, was how Steinberg could take something that I know nothing about, and make it feel very familiar. The inmates might have made choices that you and I didn't, but they aren't so very different from us. Given a different turn out of the genetic lottery, had we been born into lives of poverty, gang warfare, and drugs, would we have acted so differently? There's no blame assigned here, though no one is absolved of guilt either. Crime is not purely the fault of one's social conditions, it also requires indvidual choices that have consequences. But Steinberg shows, through stories both touching and tragic, that convicts are in some ways people trying to do the best they can, with little education, guidance, or reason to hope. Some criminals are evil masterminds with cold steel where souls should be. But a lot of them are just people in crappy situations who never had some of the advantages that many of us take for granted. In short, he shows that just because you have respect for the law does not mean you can't also have compassion for those on the other side of legality.

Running the Books is a must read. A new book from an author who I hope has many more stories inside him to tell.