? For the Love of Reading (Premium)

I've written about my love of reading here and there over the years. And while some of this is difficult to find, Night Shift (Premium) and Re-readable (Premium) are good places to start if you're curious. (Looking at these now, it's interesting to me that each includes a story about a book--Night Shift by Stephen King and The Russia House by John le Carré, respectively--that was seminal in my reading experiences.) But I also highlight my favorite books--these days, e-books and audiobooks--each year. For example, this past year, 2023, 2022, and 2021.

When I was growing up, books were, well, books, these paper items that took up space and became unwieldy over time as the collection grew. I started buying books as soon as I had the money to do so, and I spent much of my teenage and young adult years in bookstores.

By the time my wife and I moved to Phoenix in 1993, three years into our marriage, my book collection was already big enough to require several boxes to store them all. And we initially kept those boxes at my parent's house in Massachusetts, unsure when we'd have a place of our own so they could be shipped out to us.

That took a few years, as it turns out, and my parents moved the boxes of books out of their attic where I'd putt them without telling me, later claiming they were worried about the weight. This always seemed like a non-issue to me--I would have just made sure the boxes were placed over cross-beams--but whatever, my parents are nuts. They moved the books out to the garage, where many were ruined, in time, by mold. I discovered this on a trip home, and it felt disrespectful. To me and the books.

I moved the books that weren't too gross back into the attic, positioning them over cross-beams just in case. But it was only a matter of time. And before long, my vastly reduced book collection, still smelling of mold, arrived non-ceremonially at our apartment in Phoenix. They were our problem again. But it was a problem that I was happy to have: As any book lover will tell you, part of the appeal of books is that you can collect them, organize them, and display them like some big game hunter. We purchased giant bookcases to hold the books. And when we finally moved back to the Boston area in 1999, it all came with us. (As did similar collections of VHS and cassette tapes. Our DVD and CD years were still ahead of us.)

The physicality of books was cited as the key reason early e-book detractors rejected the shift to digital, and it's a debate that continues to this day in some circles. But I never understood this. Having carted my books across the country and then moved them multiple times in-state afterward, I began to see my collection as both good and bad. And when it came to e-books, the good outweighed the bad. I loved having books as much as anyone, but I also understood that I would one day hold my entire book collection on a device that was smaller and lighter than a paperback book. It was...