Libraries

As a child (and as an adult, at least until moving this past fall) I lived a hop, skip and a jump-over-the-cracks-that-break-your-mother's-back from a public branch library. Nothing thrilled me more than walking into the cool, dim interior, the door swishing shut behind me on the steamy summer day. So many books, all summer to read.

Simply put, I read because my mother was a reader. She would usually have three or four books stacked up on her bedside table, ready for that half hour of golden reading time at the end of the day. What you see modeled, you copy (except for the reading right before bed thing - bad experience with a Stephen King novel).

But for all that I love that crisp, slightly musty, fresh ink smell of a new book, the weight of it in my hands promising adventure and escape, I've come to love my Kindle just as well. Perhaps not so much the physical device, but the easy availability of the written word.

In the ten months I've had the Kindle, I've read over forty books, which, considering my more than full time job and other hobbies and responsibilities (and my fondness for sleeping eight hours a night) is pretty impressive. In the last couple of weeks, I've started using the cloud reader at lunch time, picking up where I left off in one of my current reads (Biblical Eldership: An Urgent Call to Restore Biblical Church Leadership at the moment) rather than surfing mindlessly on the net.

While my library will never look like the one above - for some things, it's just better to have an actual book - I'm grateful to whoever came up with the idea to make our personal libraries so very portable.