Collected Miscellany

I know Amazon isn’t real popular right about now (if it was ever popular with the literary crowd) and the story I am about to comment on is old.  But I wanted to comment on it at the time and never managed to do so.  I think it is worth noting in case you missed it.

In his commentary on the Tournament of Books championship, John Warner echoed my sentiments toward publishing and eBooks perfectly in saying “Let a thousand flowers bloom—only free market, rather than commie-style.”

But he also offered a powerful example of the attractiveness of the Kindle:

The digital/print divide was reinforced for me this weekend after reading the New York Times Sunday Book Review online. The lead review was of Wells Tower’s new short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. It’s a rave and reinforced many of the great things I’ve been reading elsewhere, as well as my own impressions of Mr. Tower’s writing, having read his fiction in McSweeney’s and his nonfiction in Harper’s. It has become, officially, a “book I want.”

In the same edition there is a review of another new collection of stories, Caitlin Macy’s Spoiled. Another positive review, though the description doesn’t make the book sound as immediately appealing to me specifically as Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Still, it became, officially, a “book I’d like to check out.”

This was Saturday, early, maybe eight o’clock. It was raining, unseasonably cool. I’d finished digesting the paper and was working on my oatmeal and I figured I’d see what’s what with these two new story collections. With the weather and the early hour, I wasn’t going to go anywhere, so I turned to the wife’s Kindle and found that only Macy’s book has a Kindle edition. I’d downloaded the first story in seconds, finished it in 15 minutes, and ordered the rest of the book right then and there. Meanwhile, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned remains in my unbought, “books I want” category, potentially forever since I’m constantly coming across books I want. Wells Tower and his publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux would’ve had a sale. Now, who knows? It may just get buried under the avalanche of new books.

That story illustrates one critical aspect of what makes the Kindle so useful and attractive (and dangerous quite frankly).  If you have a sudden desire to read a book, as John Madden might say: “Boom!” you can be reading it is seconds.

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