FOR THE LOVE OF WORDS!!!

Just a few days ago, amidst much fanfare and drooling, it was announced that the Kindle was coming to Canada. Immediately I raised my left and smacked myself on the forehead muttering a tiny bullshit into the mix. I had hoped that we would only be able to get pirated versions of the Kindle into Canada, not for any anarchist middle finger to corporation reasons, but for the saving of books.

I love books. My mom was the first to instill the love of reading in me. As a kid I demanded books be read to me. When I would begin to fall asleep my mom would pull the old trick of skipping pages and I would suddenly wake up and make her go back to the missed sections, so much had I memorized each and every Seussian sentence. That love has sustained and followed me through my life. I took books everywhere. I always had a book with me. Mostly I was always bored, a person with a roving mind that could only be quieted by the pondering and fussing over books and stories. I took books into classes, hiding them under my desks and stealing sentences while teachers were instructing, sticking them in back pockets and reading while outside sucking down a cigarette at the butt hut. I would even take them into mosque and read throughout prayers and religious ceremonies deriving much more spiritual satisfaction from stephen king and J.D. Salinger than from praying to a God I wasn't sure I believed in (or rather one that might believe in me). Books for me were everything, solace, pleasure, escape, fancy. A good night for me included knocking down some chapters in a story and marvelling over how some authors got tone and setting just right and letting myself get swept away in stories and ideas.

I still take books everywhere. I still always have a book with me.

Now I find myself mistrustfully confronting an age where print is dying at an alarming rate. We have grown into a world of instant gratification, fingertip controlled world where we demand things right away. It is a nano world, clamorous for information the second it becomes available. We live in a world that feels like it's getting smaller, we try to de-clutter, downsize and "edit" our own lives down to sparse details that make it relevant. How much longer then can books survive in this climate that seems hostile to the book itself? The book now takes up space, it is another thing to add to a pile, another ting to throw out or get rid of, a weight. It isn't the story that is dying, it is the medium, the presentation of the story that is changing. I admit it is with regret and no small sense irony that I type this. My message here is being broadcast on virtual paper with virtual words. Though if I had the choice it would be written and packaged with a cover, something you could pick up and leaf though and not need an internet connection to access. Something more in partnership with the concept of leisure.

Books to me are personal. I dog ear pages. I've dropped many books, mussed up many dust jackets, torn some pages and had books fall apart and clumsily taped them back together. I've highlighted some books, and underlined many others, jotted noted in sections. Even writing my name on the inside cover to convey ownership. I've made them mine no matter how I got them, once they were mine I made sure they stayed that way. I gave them my touch, my little mark of saying I read this and this is what I felt while doing it.

There are also the other nuances of books, the typeface chosen by the author, the picture of the author at the back, the cover design, the counting of pages to the next break, chapter or section. The smell of a new book, the feel of a new book, the feel of a book once loved, the oldness of the pages and the feeling that someone has been there before, the sound of flipping pages and the crinkle of the page as you turn it in anticipation eagerly seeking the next word. For me holding onto a book is a weight worth keeping.

Books can also be a conversation starters. I once got into a conversation about Marcel Proust with an elderly gentleman for six subway stops when he saw me reading the first book of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time." Seeing someone read a book in the open is a entrance into what that person is feeling, and brings back memories of what you might have felt when reading the same thing.

You can't do this on a machine. The is nowhere to dog ear a page. You can highlight but it makes it such a static response. It becomes dull and grey, full of pixels. Books don't run out of batteries and don't need you to adjust screen settings. You can lend a book to a friend but lending a machine to a friend seems downright silly. I would rather turn a pages then scroll up and down. Putting your hands over the pages in a book in oddly sensual but over an E-reader? It's just dirty, you have fingerprints you now need to clean up so you can see the screen and text clearly again. Books can be twirled, tossed and treated with more ease than a machine. Do that with an e-reader and you might have just royally fucked up your investment.

You could counter this and say that you can hold hundreds of texts on one device saving the burden of carrying and lugging all those texts around. I would argue that makes it more of a compendium to a book collection rather than something to replace it. Of the things in my one bedroom apartment I value most, I choose my bookshelf. It has been lovingly arranged in sections and by authors. It isn't because I want to show how many books I've read, it shows me however what I have read, what I value in literature and words. It serves as a personal time machine, I look at the shelves and see where my imagination has been taken, how my ideas have been formed though time. Its a visual representation of my love and learning, it shows how I've grown as a person, what genres and authors I've read and kept with me. I go back to those books many times over, re-reading them, looking at them and seeing how my thoughts on the books and their ideas themselves have evolved, changed and grown with the passing of time. As I continue to read the shelf cannot hope to contain all I purchase and keep, so books start being stacked. It looks messier just as my ideas and psyche push my mental boundaries of neatness and chaos. Books begin migrating to different places in the apartment wherever an inch of space can hold them. I fail to see this as a burden, I see it as a joy, an absolute, wonderful joy that allows me to express the love of literature I continue to cultivate and nurture and harvest. An E-Reader would be handy say if I was on a sabbatical or sojourn where I could not take the physical weight of all these books with me, but it would never replace the feeling of coming home and slowly choosing just the right book by looking at it on a shelf, in its place amongst others, handling it, find a spot to sit or lie down and opening it, cracking the spine a little and sinking into it without the feel of plastic or sound of whirring machinery peeling away form the experience. The emotional weight of the books, the journey through them, the journey of receiving them, far outweighs the physical burden of weight a books might have.


I realize it is inevitable that we will move to a paperless world. Our environment dictates that this will come to pass and it might be a better planetary solution. In the case of news it is an essential step forward. While I miss sitting with a newspaper and taking my time to go through the paper, in a constantly updating world where information is rapidly changing an E-reader is a good thing. I refresh news sites all the time because the information is constantly being updated and a simple morning paper becomes an anachronistic idea an hour after you've finished reading it.

Books don't change however. Once they are published (unless they are translations that need updating) they are what they are. They are rooted to their moment. There is no instant update for books. They are the whispers we seek in the dark.

More and more we type, we submit online, though the access of books is far more manageable than the internet. Books can be clandestine, can succeed where access has been blocked or threatened. Books can be passed, through secret hands far better than electronically monitored sources. They are hidden treasures that within contain hidden treasure of our hidden treasures. They are the messages we seek and send out.

The one thing I will miss the most if this truly does come to pass, is the sheer happiness I get from finding and discovering used bookstores like Seekers on Spadina and Bloor or the BMV at Yonge & Eglinton. Little gems or big ones anywhere in the world. Even if I never purchase anything there, but to go and spend time looking through collections, leafing through pages, finding just the right book. Finding a quirky shop or quirky owner, having impromptu discussions with them about books or hearing their thoughts on what you are buying. Spending time gazing and marveling at all the words and the freedom they project in a large store or seeing hundreds upon hundreds of books crammed into a small shop, wiping the dust off and examining the book. Finding something you've always wanted to read or something you read a long time ago and want to make part of your collection once more. The small things about book hunting that make it a pleasure to keep doing it over and over.

Maybe that's what it comes down to, I'm a collector of books, I am a collector of words. No machine can replace that. Machines break, they fizzle and sputter and require updating, collections do not require updating, only additions and I plant my flag on this land and invite you to join me on my island, where we can exchange words and books until our eyes close.