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Rituals of book-buying
28/1/11 16:22There are two kinds of books: the ones that desperately want to come home with me after I've read a paragraph or a page, and the ones that don't.
No doubt this gives certain biases to my book-buying -- not books that open with whiz-bang action, but voicy books, confidently written books, even if they never develop a plot or don't stick the landing -- but I've very rarely been disappointed by buying my books that way. And it happens rarely enough so that I don't feel much guilt over buying any book that does that to me. Hiromi Goto's Half World, Elizabeth Hand's Black Light, Mary Gentle's Ash...
So it was a little odd to go into Barnes and Noble on my snow day yesterday, find a book whose first page bowled me over, and then remind myself that I wasn't going to take it to the cash register, I was going to download it to my Kindle.
I'm not at all attached to paper books; I'm surprised to find how much I'm attached to this ritual, of hopefully opening that first page, and carrying the book around the store seeing if it really really belongs to me, and putting it back and picking it up again. It makes me think of the first books I bought with my own money, 11 years old and walking to the bookstore, and being so thoroughly enchanted with Julie of the Wolves that I read the rest of it that same afternoon on the tire swing in the park.
No doubt this gives certain biases to my book-buying -- not books that open with whiz-bang action, but voicy books, confidently written books, even if they never develop a plot or don't stick the landing -- but I've very rarely been disappointed by buying my books that way. And it happens rarely enough so that I don't feel much guilt over buying any book that does that to me. Hiromi Goto's Half World, Elizabeth Hand's Black Light, Mary Gentle's Ash...
So it was a little odd to go into Barnes and Noble on my snow day yesterday, find a book whose first page bowled me over, and then remind myself that I wasn't going to take it to the cash register, I was going to download it to my Kindle.
I'm not at all attached to paper books; I'm surprised to find how much I'm attached to this ritual, of hopefully opening that first page, and carrying the book around the store seeing if it really really belongs to me, and putting it back and picking it up again. It makes me think of the first books I bought with my own money, 11 years old and walking to the bookstore, and being so thoroughly enchanted with Julie of the Wolves that I read the rest of it that same afternoon on the tire swing in the park.