E-Books

After all the years, after all the books I’ve accumulated and read in my lifetime, maybe even read more than once, I’m finally admitting to something I thought I’d never admit: I’m now in love with e-books. I swore I’d never read anything but books I could hold in my hands. My love of books was always about being able to own them and have them in case I needed them. I’ve probably bought at least a thousand books in my lifetime, read them, then given them away to friends, or kept them like old buddies on my shelves. When I was very young I had all the L. Frank Baum Oz books, which later went to nieces and nephews. Then I had all the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books and most of the others Burroughs had written. These too went to nieces and nephews. My early love of science fiction brought me to everything Heinlein wrote, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury, and too many others to list. And then I became an English teacher and owned most of the novels of the authors I most admired—Twain’s Huck Finn, Melville’s Moby Dick, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, all of Hemingway’s novels and short stories, Steinbeck’s East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and the list goes on and on. When I retired, I devoted most of my reading to thrillers and mysteries, and I owned and read them as fast as I could. I’ve written about most of them on this blog, the writers who amaze and fascinate me with the prodigiousness of their output. There's John D. MacDonald and my favorite character Travis McGee

and Stephen and his unrealistic output.

The more books I bought, the more I had to find other homes for when my bookshelves brimmed over. And now I’ve found the simplicity of e-books. My wife and I own an IPad mini and two Kindle Fires, on which I can download for $.99 to $3.99 hundreds of books, maybe thousands of books (I still don’t understand how the storage capacity of these things keeps growing and growing), all there in my hand. No more need for bookcases and shelves except for those books in which I’ve written cryptic marginal notes, reminders of my thoughts from various stages of my life. The one flaw in the e-book phenomenon: Where does one write marginal notes? I’m sure there’s a way to do that, but I’m still not proficient enough to know how. For each of my e-books, I have information about the author, publication details, other books by that author, and recommendations of other books similar to what I’ve purchased. More information than this old English teacher needs. But it’s all very handy.