Now I know that some of my best friends read their books on one of the various electronic readers and are ecstatic about how easy it is to carry around a ton of books this way.
But Elin was by today, and as she left she asked if she could borrow my hard copy of Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue. Sure, I said, and then I asked "Why?" A couple of weeks ago, right after I'd spent several days enjoying it, she told me she'd bought a Kindle copy and was reading it on her iPad.
"Because it's so hard to read," she said. She went on to say that she found the Kindle format, at least, not really conducive to easy reading and had given up on her e-copy But my paper back was someting that she wanted to plunge into.
Yes, indeed, I thought. There's nothing like a real book. Right now I'm getting ready to take up The Horse, the Wheel and Language by David W. Anthony, a fascinating book about how the Eurasian steppes were home to both the proto-language that eventually evolved into English and a host of other languages, and to teh horse and wagon. I'd found the book referred to a couple of times as I did research for my new book on roads, but I couldn't easily find it in Montreal. No library but the Grande bibliothèque du Québec has it, and then only in an electronic version that you must read on-line. After spending two days trying to make my way through the pagination which kept jumping around I went looking for a real book: Amazon.ca had it and delivered it within two days.
So tonight, as Elin presumably settles down to read Telegraph Avenue, chez elle, I'm returning to where I left off in Anthony's fascinating work: page 99, which I think I've tried to read four time on-line. How nice it will be to hold the copy in my lap and turn the pages!
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