Have You Heard of That Kindle Thing?

So, sometimes the Book Review -- my old friend -- and I get tired of each other. We are not the perfect fit that say, this blog and its two readers are. Sometimes, the NYTBR gets a little BookTV for me. I always think that I should like BookTV, but then I always find myself watching the third Josh Elliott/Hannah Storm Sportscenter in a row. The problem is mutual -- sometimes, I want more depth then the Book Review is set up to provide (no spoilers and all), and sometimes, I am just cold more of a book nerd than whatever other kind of nerd they are catering to on BookTV. Like, they will have a guy on talking about the CIA, for CIA nerds, and I will be more curious about whether or not there is anything in the book as frustrating to think about as the fact that David Addington brought his own gazpacho to lunch everyday.

The place to go for way more depth is, of course, "scholarly articles", which are fine to read and to talk about if you can get past the fact that everyone will stop wanting to talk to you when you say things like "Great article in Milton Quarterly last quarter, you should check it out." For the other kind of thing that I like -- pure book nerdiness -- you have to just wait for the Times to deliver, and boy did they deliver today.

The title is already great -- "With Kindle, Can You Tell It's Proust?" -- and then imagine my delight when, after some scene setting about Kindle and the usual oohing and aahing over the putatively great Kindle techne (boring) we get this, the crux of the piece: "Please, they’re [that is, they who worry about Kindle's effects on the economics of reading are] overlooking the really important concern: How will the Kindle affect literary snobbism?" The effects of anything on literary snobbism are, of course, the first effects I think about. I also found myself nodding happily when I read some of the testimonials later in the article: "When I was a teenager waiting in line for a film showing at the Museum of Modern Art and someone was carrying a book I loved, I would start to have fantasies about being best friends or lovers with that person" (although minus points to that guy for showing off that he sees movies at MOMA); "I wanted people to know I wasn’t just a temp,” he said, “but rather a temp who was reading Ulysses." Judging and hoping to be judged by books? Done and done. It's not even two pm and I've done both of those already today. The problem with the Kindle, as assessed here, is that this makes this hard. If I were Kindling Ulysses instead of carrying it around, well, for all we know you're just Kindling, oh, I don't know, something easy and non-impressive to read. (Something un-Prousty, say.)

This reminded me of the article, discussed here last year, about whether or not there were books that represented deal-breakers in relationships, and The Furious Debate that that engendered. Except, of course, there was no Furious Debate at all. There as here, the only thing that we really come away with is mild snark against popular books (this year, He's Just Not Into You, last year, Marley and Me) and the sense that, the fantasies of all book nerds (myself included) notwithstanding, there's really no eluctable way in which the sum of the things you read, or want to read, or endorse, constitute the person you are.

That is kind of a bummer. The part of me that looks forward to nothing more than this kind of article -- not a book review, not a scholarly article, but a sheer slice of nerd fantasy sociology -- also wants to believe that the way you make friends is to find people who like the same books as you, preferably just by walking around with your book like a badge, and then skip to making snarky jokes about Marley and Me together. But really, you have to actually act like a whole person instead of a syllabus, which, as iterated, is difficult. That's the sort of sadness of things like this Kindle article: if the world was built by book nerds, the Kindle would be an intolerable instrument of opacity; in the world as we have it, it's no big.

This is all true, and is all the sort of thing one knows, as one knows that the world is round. But it's not at all the case that one has to act as such. You can bet that, the next time I see a girl in a coffeeshop reading the Sun Also Rises or whatever, I will, however briefly, envision her as the future Mrs. Schratz. Isn't it pretty to think so?