Papercuts

I take after my dad in respect to not wearing shoes at my desk. I'm not wearing them right now.

That being said, there is a social circle out there who still listen to vinyl records, who hunt flea markets and obscure music shops for LPs and 45s. One of the radio stations where I live will occasionally have a show that plays nothing but vinyls. This social circle says the sound is warmer, more genuine and deeper. They say that with the invention of CDs and MP3s, music has lost its soul.

I used to think they were just being snobby elitists who didn't want to get on the technology bandwagon, but then I realized: I'm the same way with books. I would rather have a broken, creased, dog-eared book in my hands over a Kindle or iPad or anything like that. There are two books that I can think of off the top of my head that I will probably carry with me for as long as I can.

One is The Princess Bride. I grew up with this movie and didn't realize it was an actual book until I was in middle school. My sister had a copy of it in her room that I adopted when she went to college, and within a few years I'd read it so many times that the book literally fell apart right between chapters 3 and 4. I was devastated, but that didn't stop me from reading it over and over and over again. Finally, I stumbled across a roll of packing tape, hatched a little ingenuity, and had the book more or less in one piece.

Fast forward a few years. I'd moved out of my parent's house for college, and decided that it was high time to replace my ratty, taped, and worn copy of The Princess Bride. I toddled onto Barnes & Nobel's site and found hey, a hardcover version! I bought it, but when the time came to actually read it I couldn't. It didn't feel right. It felt like I'd turned my back on an old and reliable friend for the new hotness. Before long I'd popped it on the shelf and had returned to my ratty, taped, and worn copy. It felt a little like coming home at a time when I wasn't sure where home was. My parents had built a new house shortly after I graduated high school, and that didn't feel like home yet. At the same time I had moved into this charming little apartment, albeit with a psychotic queen of passive-aggressiveness for a roommate and even though I had my room and all my things arranged just so, that didn't feel like home yet either. Something about the way the tape between chapters 3 and 4 cracked, though, that felt like home.

The second book is The Simarillion. I was introduced to that book by someone I dated in high school and while the relationship didn't work out, I am glad it happened because otherwise I never, ever would've read this under my own duress. It's by Tolkien, and it's essentially the mythos of Middle-Earth. It tells all these grand, epic tales of the creation, how the sun and moon came to be, the old gods, ancient wars, tragedies, romances, dragons, good guys, bad guys, so forth and so on. On paper it sounds about as exciting as a tube of toothpaste. Some argue that when you read it, it's like reading a tube of toothpaste. It did take me a little while to get used to the language and the names (oh, the names. I pretty much just cough through them in my head to this day) but it is one book I am glad to say I've read and will continue to read.

I went through sort of the same thing with The Simarillion as I did with The Princess Bride. My copy was getting worn out and the thought of losing it was heart-breaking. I bought a hardcover copy to replace it and have not touched it. Sure, the ink on my paperback is getting a little smudged and the binding is broken, but what does it matter?

There are other books that are starting to show their age - the copy of Pride and Prejudice I found at my grandparent's house and kept on a whim, The Lord of the Rings which I saved for and hemmed and hawed over actually buying, various Harry Potter volumes. I'm really hoping that some day I can pass these books onto my kids and tell them that when I was their age, books had a feeling that wasn't plastic. They had a texture, and a smell, and a sound. They gave you papercuts and took up room in your backpack but you could hold them. They had a soul.

And then I'll probably tell them that I also had to walk to school uphill both ways against the wind with my feet wrapped in barbed-wire for traction in the winter, and to go take out the garbage, and to stop picking on their sister, and to not make me turn this van around...