The Best of Both Worlds

“Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”
Maya Angelou 

I received a Kindle Fire from my husband for Christmas this year.  It was supposed to be my gift for Christmas, 2010.  I stopped the purchase at the last minute last year.  He bought one this time before I could stop him and gave it to me.  It languished around a bit from December 25^th until January 4^th, when I picked it up and finally began to use it.   I’ve now read two books on it in three days.  

I had long resisted an e-reader.  I’ve loved books since childhood,  and to me,  obtaining a Kindle smacked of a betrayal of that most precious thing: a printed book.   

Reading is one of my “deep and continuing needs”, to quote Ms. Angelou.  Some of my best childhood memories are of books, and the library.  In my hometown of Cartersville, Georgia, the first public library I entered around the age of six or thereabouts was an old two-story house that sat in the shadow of the historical courthouse, surrounded by hundred-year-old oak trees.  The house was a sprawling old Craftsman-style with lots of dark wood.  Not really all that inviting on the outside, but the inside was a magical place.  Inside were towering shelves of books, a beautiful marble floor that was enticingly cool on hot days, and a lovely bronze statue called “Pandora” that fascinated me as a child and is still on display in the new library.   And the smell!  I learned to love the smell of books and libraries before I was ten years old.

I was a painfully shy only child who took refuge in books from an early age. My mother and I would spend many hot summer afternoons in the library.  I devoured J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan,  L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and delighted in the antics of Astrid Lindgren’s wonderfully eccentric Pippi Longstocking.   

My interest in mysteries was awakened reading about the adventures of Jupiter, Pete, and Bob in Robert Arthur Jr.’s “Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators” series.   And, of course, I read all the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Trixie Belden mysteries I could get my hands on.  My third grade teacher read E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web aloud to our class, and it became one of my favorite books of all time. 

An elderly neighbor, a retired teacher, gave me a beautiful copy of Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales for my seventh birthday.   I read the stories of “Thumbelina”,  “The Ugly Duckling”, and “The Little Mermaid” over and over.  It’s tattered and old, but I still have that book.  When I was in fourth grade and terribly sick with chicken pox that winter, my father brought home a copy of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which I’ve re-read countless times.   A fifth-grade teacher introduced me to the world of Laura Ingalls with the Little House series, and Mary Norton’s fantasy series for children, The Borrowers.  I still love The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett as much now at age forty-eight as I did at age eleven.  As a young teen I read J.R.R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, Marion Zimmer Bradley,  Jules Verne and many others, and my love of Sci-Fi/Fantasy was born.

You see, I love reading, and I also love books.   I love the feel and smell of new books and old books.   I have a modest collection of vintage detective novels from the 1930’s and 40’s -  works of Agatha Christie,  Mary Roberts Rinehart,  Dashiell Hammett, and others.  I love reading inscriptions in the old books (one says: Happy Birthday with love to Edwin from Mary, 1937).   I imagine Edwin reading the book – did he like it?  Were he and Mary married?  Lovers?  Brother and sister?   I love browsing antique malls and used book stores for great deals on old books, and I love book stores, and the new, even more modern, library.

I also love technology, and all the new things it has brought us.  I feel very lucky to be alive in this time period.  It must be similar to what it was like for the people who were living during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, and all the wonderful inventions that changed life so much back then within the time frame of forty years or so.      

So I now have a Kindle.  My favorite thing about my Kindle Fire is the self-illumination:  if lighting is poor, you can still read!  What would I have done with one of these as a child?  It would have been much easier than smuggling one of my dad’s flashlights in my room so I could sneak and finish a book (even though it was past my bedtime). 

I won’t give up my printed books or my love of them.  They are as much a part of me as my skin, it seems.  I will still get up on Saturday mornings and make my library trips.  I will still scour antique malls for great finds, and I will still delight in the discovery of a wonderful independent book store like the Winder Binder Gallery and Bookstore in Chattanooga’s quirky North Shore area.   I will continue to sit outside on my garden bench on bright spring afternoons with a book in my hands and the sun warm on my shoulders, and read while I listen to the bees working the flowers. 

I look at my Kindle as another tool to augment my love of reading.  But it doesn’t take away my love of books.