I Do Love a Good Book

In a flurry of fanfare, Go Set a Watchman was published this past summer.  It remains a hot topic of conversation this school year, and I've had multiple people ask either if I've read it or if I'm planning on reading it.

I'm not sure about my answer yet, but one of these conversations really stood out to me.

My husband comes from a family of readers.  Both of his parents love to read, and they read all sorts of stuff -- his father reads a lot of mystery/thriller stuff, and his mom reads a lot of realistic fiction and educational stuff.  Between the two, I always have someone to talk with about books when I visit.

My mother in law in particular likes to stay up on current best-sellers, so over this summer she bought and read Go Set a Watchman.  I was on the phone with her around when she started reading it, and she asked if I was planning on reading it.

I was honest: I'm not really sure.  I didn't love To Kill a Mockingbird (which continues to scandalize my fellow Language Arts teachers :)), so I didn't have a lot of interest in its sequel.  On top of that, I'd read a lot of the controversy so I wasn't sure how I felt about reading something that Harper Lee, perhaps, didn't really want published.

My opinion basically became this: If I heard from enough people I trusted that it was good, I'd probably read it.  So I asked what she thought.  Like so many others, she wasn't sure -- she liked parts, but couldn't resist comparing it to Mockingbird, against which it of course fell short.

At the end of this conversation, like so many others, I told her, "Well, when you're finished with it, I'll borrow your copy and try it."

"Oh, no! You can't," she said rather sadly. "It's on my Kindle."  

I realized then just how much I miss real books.

There's something about a hard copy of a book for me.  I'm a very hands-on reader: I dog-ear pages, underline quotes, add post-its, all that stuff as I read.  I want to remember important lines, moments I loved, language I found beautiful as I was experiencing it.  I cry on my books, leaving smears and wrinkles where emotions really got to me.  The bottoms of pages are torn where I was in a rush to get to the next page.  My books are not just that; they are the experience of my reading, too.

And the experience of being handed a copy of a well-loved book... there's nothing like it.  I love knowing that someone trusted me with their favorite book.  I learn so much about them -- which events or pages they found important, what quotes they loved, and in doing so, I come to know them better.  When, on our first date, my husband gave me a copy of his favorite book, my heart melted.

I do indeed love a good book.

Don't get me wrong -- I read digitally too.  I have a tablet with the Kindle app where I can borrow books from Amazon, and I upload PDFs of friends' writing so I can read it on the go.  I read a disgusting amount of fanfiction, all of which is through digital media.  I have borrowed others' Kindles to read a book they own and I do not, and I've lent mine out too.

But I worry that this practice, somehow, devalues the experience of reading.  Suddenly, it becomes screen time, and screen time is something you're supposed to limit.  Blue lights that keep you awake, screen resolutions that make your eyes tired, and so on -- there are lots of good reasons to limit time in front of a screen.  But reading! I can't think of a good reason to limit how long I spend in another world, how long I spend enjoying what life could be like, exploring the ways ideas connect, understanding others' experiences of the world.

Reading is a very real, authentic experience for me.  It's reveling in a part of humanity: the only species ever to record their experiences in writing, and the only species to share that writing with others in order to create a shared experience of being.

There are times, like now, when I miss actual books.  Most of what I've read lately has been online: I've read a bunch of fanfiction, I've been working my way through a series of student essays that are all submitted using Google Drive, and I've been doing a lot of research for a class I'm taking, which is mostly online articles from databases.

I miss books.  I miss the physical qualities of a book -- the ink on the page, the rustle of pages turning, the bending of the binding as I get into the meat of the story, all of it.

It's not a feeling I was expecting to uncover, but I haven't read a real book in almost a month.  I miss it.

So when it comes to Go Set a Watchman, maybe I will read it eventually, and maybe I will just borrow my mother-in-law's Kindle, but it will never be the same as if she handed me a book.