I did something on my birthday that I swore I would never do. Something I've been morally opposed to since I learned about it in college. Something so naughty, so personally transgressive, so divisive, that I'm sure one half of my friends will recoil in disgust, the other half applaud wickedly, welcoming me to their debauched rank.
Frankly, I'm surprised my wife has stayed as long as she has, though I expect the lawyers to arrive with papers any day now.
I bought a Kindle.
God, it feels so good just to say it.
Actually, it was a matter of practicality: the house Bird and I moved into this past April seemed spacious enough...until I started unpacking my library. We filled a bookcase at the top of the stairs, and a half bookcase in our bedroom, and a full bookcase next to my desk. Our art books went on the bookcase near the house's living room studio. Harry Potter went on the top of a bookshelf. My 1960s editions of the Sherlock Holmes books, my Chronicles of Narnia boxed set, my battered Silmarillion and dog-eared Ring trilogy and my childhood copy of The Hobbit are all precarious upon the top of the bedroom bookcase.
There are still ten boxes of books to be unpacked. A box of my father's old science fiction paperbacks from the 60s and 70s is sitting in the living room, under my guitars. There are no more bookcases to be had, or room for them if there were.
So I bought a digital bookshelf.
I'm reading a book called Wagner the Wehr-Wolf, by George W.M. Reynolds on it right now. It was written in 1865, in a style I can only describe as delightfully, hilariously gothic: it is loquacious and lividly purple stuff, and I am enjoying it immensely. People are dying of grief, and there are secret love affairs discussed at length in semi-public places, there's a very clever, scheming woman who is deaf and dumb (or presents herself as such). and everyone is "perfect in their long-limbed, symmetrical beauty, though somewhat haughty and given to condescension, but not without a subtle, prideful kindness." Many things in the novel are "ineffable," but that doesn't stop Mr. Reynolds trying anyway. That sort of thing.
Oh. And there's a werewolf. (Who is pretending to be the brother of his granddaughter to hide the fact that he is, in actual fact, her aged and piteous grandfather made young and vital once more by a moment of Faustian weakness some ten winters afore.) This book is so much fun. It's the sort of thing I would recommend to the nerdiest of my bookish friends. Clara would love it, for example (she gets a real bang out of Chaucer, and medieval literature in general, which always delights me when I remember). Katie Hubbard-Haines has probably already read it. Probably by a dying fire, with a glass of rich and tawny wine, and her marvelous black coat. I do not know if Amber Rose would like it or not, but I would love to talk to her and hear her opinions on the women in the novel. She is one of the smartest, fiercest feminists I know, with the scholar's sense of literary context.
Best of all, Wagner the Wehr-Wolf was free. I was surprised at just how many books I've been meaning to read are available for free on the Amazon Kindle store: Zanoni, and Bleak House, to name two. The Country of the Blind, by H.P. Lovecraft, and The Georgics, to name two more. And Falling Angel, and Jurgen, by the inimitable James Branch Cabell, and Great Expectations and Men Without Bones and The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club and The Sound of His Horn and...
You see what I'm saying.
It's not the same as feeling the pages and smelling the binding of a thrift-store copy, but I like my new little bookshelf.
Before I post this, in the spirit of mysterious goings-on and obvious foreshadowing: I am currently in the process of calibrating my HD TV to Rec.709...perhaps to finally fix a color grade, done over a year ago, so that a Director's Cut sound mix can commence, so that, this year, finally, finally...
But no. I've said too much. Suffice it to say: the Marlon hard drives are back in my possession for the first time in over a year, and there are mysterious stirrings on the moors, and an ardent (if somewhat haughty) glint in my eye...