My Private I

Reasons to buy a Kindle

Disclaimer: I didn't sleep with anyone in Amazon PR.

1. "It is just as marvelous that, when we leave for travel to exotic destinations devoid of English bookstores, we no longer look like refugees, weighted down with all our worldly possessions in the form of 15 or 20 books between us. Not only can we carry several hundred books inside our Kindles, we can buy more anywhere along the way, eliminating that frantic rush to a bookstore the night before flying to Beijing or driving into Alabama."- Bruce Tognazzini

2. Return of the Unitasking. (Yes- the word has no sex appeal like unitard) but reading the Kindle sends my brain to a cozy living room where there's the faint crackle of logs settling in the fireplace, a blanket worth curling up in and the soft whisper of snow falling outside.  Mr. 23 hipster high on sunrise-after- sunrise after Red Bulls and modafinil scrips can have my multi-tasking. I don't miss it. 

 

Stockpiling books

When I think of the world's future, I think of all the essential things we'll eventually run out of. Food, water, sanity, the list goes on. I can live in a world where there's no electricity and no Internet signal (goodbye dearly departed Hulu.com- I'll miss you- sniff.sniff.), but I would be despondent without books. If rioting broke out tomorrow, I'd be looting the nearest bookstore. The way I look at it, there's no difference between me and the guy who carries out a 52 inch plasma TV from the storefront's broken window. We steal what we value most.

We've already stockpiled food, so over the past months, I've adopted the guilty pleasure of bringing home a novel each time I visit a bookstore. Like the lovers I took to bed in my twenties, I have no willpower with books. Good stories beg to be consumed in hours. Not days or weeks. I can't ration words- be it the ones on the page or the ones inside my head. Technically, I've already eaten some of my stash but it was so fucking well-written. Delicious.

"We need to talk about kevin" by lionel shriver
"Invention of everything else" by samantha hunt
"Falling man" by don de lillo

Borrowing David Foster Wallace

While Hurricane Ike robbed power from houses this past weekend in Houston, a bright light was stolen on the West Coast.  Upon hearing the news that writer David Foster Wallace was found dead, hanging from his Claremont, CA house, I regret that the books that made the biggest impression on me at the turn of the millenium-"Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" and "Girl with Curious Hair"- were ones I checked out from the library. Such brilliantly crafted observation is worthy of being bought, not borrowed.   

Instinct

"That exhilarating adolescent instinct that allows a teenager to fool himself completely into thinking that his random thoughts and acts have exalted meaning." –Daniel Clowes

While bookstore browsing over the past month, I arbitrarily bought two hauntingly beautiful written books about 911 and fictional New Yorker lives that intersect the event- Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Nicholas Rinaldi’s Between Two Rivers.  If I was 15, I would have taken my purchases as a sign of something imminent. Definitely crushing and perhaps, faintly cataclysmic.

Right now in the US, venture capitalists are throwing fistfuls of millions at Web 2.0 companies that sound like baby language babble- Rekoo, Goop- with business models of equal, utter nonsense. Meanwhile, my co-workers complain they have no time for dirt, trade sighs of relief knowing that their maids clean  2400 sq ft houses with rooms that serve no purpose, no one.  In this city, iPods in pockets are as common as car keys. Cellphones are omnipresent- everywhere and all-knowing. I recognize the sense of entitlement. Affluence at every head turn. It reminds me of the late nineties dot com boom, poised precariously close to the tipping point I call bust. Money to dust.