Books. Oh books how I love you. This morning I noticed a trend on my twitter. That trend happened to be books and their relevance. I have begun to believe, in the last few months, that I am a member of a dying breed. I have a stack of books beside me in bed. I love their smell. I love the inscriptions I sometimes find on the inside cover of a used book at a bookstore. I love to sit and look at books, to feel them, to fondle them. I feel connected to the writer. I fall in love with books. This may say something about my preference in a lover - a page rather than a warm body (ahem, let’s set my love life aside). The more I talk to people the more I realize that perhaps people are less willing to give up books than they were Cds or DVDs. There is something about a book. This morning, in a tweet, someone suggested it might have something to do with the sigma of intelligence surrounding a book. Here, I had to stop. There are stupid books. Reading on the internet is no less “smart” than reading on a page. It is a different experience, that is all. I do not stroke my computer screen (well, unless it’s a picture of a really fuzzy cat). So, let us not conflate tangible books and intelligence. Let us associate books and the place they come from, the communities they create of real bodies.
Now, I do not have anything against relationships formed, or continued, on the internet. I have many friends I have never physically met. They stimulate me in many ways, and I am happy to have met them. That said, I am always aware of the fact that if I had a chance, I would love to sit with them at a coffee shop somewhere, surrounded by hard copies. I think this is where the break down happens between "real books" and ebooks. Sure, I am ok with reading Jane Austen on a kindle. But not Hemingway. This is not a value judgements on these writers. It is simply my personal preference. I underline in Hemingway. I like to feel connected to his sentences. I do not want to be interrupted by that strange thing that these ebooks do when they change screens. I want to tenderly turn the page when he writes about oysters and white wine. Let me have that.
Also, let me, for a second, tangent on readings. I cannot attend a poetry reading online and feel connected. I want to be in the room with the poet. I want to breathe the same air, feel the tension in the lines. Without that, it is not intimate. And if there is one things poet strive for, it is intimacy. I do not mean to limit this to just poets. Prose writers and playwrights also need to be read aloud, in a public space. We need to maintain a space to do that. Writers need community, and they need to be dragged out of their houses into the musky smell of a bookstore. Artistic communities are integral to the continuation of art. Internet communities can take us only so far. We need bookstores. We need coffee shops. We need art galleries. We need that which is tangible. We need more hugs, and more handshakes. We need to, as I said, breathe the same air as each other. We need to know that other artists exist. Some day I hope to see someone tenderly holding onto a book I wrote, so I can know it meant something to them.
Can you cuddle a kindle? I don’t know. Maybe. I’d worry about some kind of weird radiation. But, you can cuddle a book a poetry. It will like it. It will be happy when you write things in it. It will love it when you write a little heart beside a phrase, or a star beside a word. Make a book happy and by extension, make a writer happy. We write so that we can connect. So, hug a book -- hug a writer.
