"Oh! You're reading Emma! I envy you..." Air Canada flight attendant, Toronto to Calgary flight.
"Oh! You're reading Cold Mountain! I bet you LOVE it. You don't? How could you not? Edward, did you hear that, she HATES Cold Mountain. I have no idea how she can hate it either" Fellow passenger on a seemingly endless Charlotte to San Francisco flight
"Moby Dick? What the hell's wrong with you? Did you fail highschool or something? Want to read a real book, take my John Grisham." Fellow passenger on a mercifully short Chicago to Detroit flight.
"Moby Dick? It's so much better the second time around isn't it?" Flight attendant coming to my rescue on the mercifully short Chicago to Detroit flight
Having spent much of March in waiting rooms and offices, I was glad to have Elizabeth Gaskell's
Wives and Daughters. At almost 700 pages, it offered a near continuous reading experience. I was aware, however, that often my reading choice was perused and evaluated by just about everyone I encountered. At times, I was naively hopeful that I'd run into someone during these many, many hours who would say "I love Mrs. Gaskell!" and we could have a long discussion about the book. On occasion, I must confess, I also thought "I'm tired, I don't feel well, please don't ask me about my book."
Although it never happened with Mrs. Gaskell, the presence of a book is often a conversation starter. I've had some fascinating conversations with people about what I or they were reading-- conversations I never would have had if one of us hadn't seen the book cover and said "How are you liking that?" The social element of books was never so apparent as when, last spring,
Moby Dick and I travelled extensively on planes and trains together (here he is in the Seattle airport). More than any other book I've read in public,
Moby solicited a morbid curiosity among the people I encountered. I couldn't read it anywhere without someone commenting on it (or, wincing sympathetically).
When someone mentioned the book, we initially started talking about
Moby Dick (it's amazing, by the way, how many people feel guilt from never finishing the book in highschool or college)but then we'd move onto other books, or I'd tell them about how I was reading it as part of a pact with a friend who I was making read Jane Austen, or how this same friend had promised me that if I started reading
Moby Dick on March 1, by the time I was done, it would be the Tigers' Opening Day (and correct he was). After we talked about
Moby Dick, we would often talk about other things. An architect asked me about eBooks and I asked him about architecture in North Carolina. Eventually, he would give me superb restaurant suggestions for Seattle and I told him about places I liked in Chicago. I talked about baseball with an accountant and about micro-breweries all because of
Moby Dick. Granted, I also had to listen to why I should be reading John Grisham with a drunk rowmate because of
Moby Dick but, on the whole, it was an amazing experience. As was, I should say, re-reading
Moby Dick.
Last week I was sitting in a waiting room with my eBook reader. It was the first time I had brought it out in public. As I was holding it, I was thinking about all of the people I've had random conversations with over the years because of the visibility of my or their reading material. As I read my Walter Pater, people seemed curious about the eBook reader itself but, logically, not about what I was reading because they could not see it. I began to wonder if the days of random conversations about reading and books are over. Or will they just be different? Maybe it's nice to have one's reading choices hidden? Maybe not.
I also started to think my friendship with He With Whom I had the Austen/ Melville Pact. An amazing friendship began in part because he perused the bookshelves in my office and we discovered we had a lot of common reading interests (oddly, it was Melville who started it all). We've always known that the physicality of books has a rich and complex social element but now that books are starting to lose some of that visibility, I think we're starting to understand those social components a little more. Just as one wouldn't necessarily offer one's iPod to a stranger for perusal, I can't imagine casually sharing the contents of my eBook reader with a new acquaintance. Ebooks, I realize, are different than print books. Yet, at their core, they're still novels or monographs or narratives and we'll always have conversations about the kinds of things that draw us to books regardless of their form. Maybe we'll have the same conversations but we'll just approach them differently. It's something I'll continue to think about (along with the whiteness of the whale, of course).
Green Onion Cakes, ShinShin, Windsor, ON
Ginger Carrot Cake, Atlas Global Bistro, Detroit
Cheese Sandwich with lettuce and mustard and a banana, Detroit River, Windsor
Good Girls Go To Paris, Detroit
The White Kristy Crepe, Good Girls Go to Paris, Detroit
Good Girls Go to Paris, Detroit
The City Grill, Windsor
A few months ago, a friend noted "you're not taking pictures anymore" and then asked "what's wrong?" Since January 1st, I've been working on another daily project that's taking up the little energy I seem to have at the end of the work day. Somehow, mentally, the space isn't there to work on photos, this project and also keep my job. I remember doing Today Photo with Alec and loved doing it: but I also remember how much time it took every day. Even though it felt great to make myself spend the time doing something I loved, it was difficult to summon the time needed to do that project well. It also meant, I wasn't working on other things. Since January 1, I have been using the scraps of time I have on another project. 
As I've mentioned before, one of the reasons I was drawn to the Sony eBook reader (and, also the Kobo) is the fact that you can read PDFs on them. For some, this may not be a huge issue but, for me, several times a month, I go to meetings with lots of required documentation. Generally, the documents are sent in PDF format and run 50-200 pages; I usually print two per page and print them double-sided. Still, that's a lot of paper every two weeks. This weekend, I realized that I could put the PDFs on my Sony reader and today my eBook reader and I went to a meeting (which I shall not name for reasons that may be apparent later on). 
In an early blog post, I had lamented the lack of content I was finding for my eBook reader and some of the problems I had with the Kindle/ Amazon pairing. As I was writing up that blog post (handwritten, ludditely, a few weeks before), I received an email from Indigo/ Chapters announcing the new Kobo reader and Kobo bookstore. The Kobo e-reader is selling for $149 Canadian and looks pretty nice (though I've not actually seen one). Like the Sony eBook reader, it also supports a range of documents from a range of sources. If I'd not got the Sony I would seriously have considered a Kobo. Check it out if you're thinking about getting an eBook reader. 
