My new Kindle

By Conor | June 25th, 2009 | 8 Comments »

Liz bought me a Kindle for Father’s Day. (A Kindle, for the proudly uninitiated, is an electronic reading device.) It is a marvelous gift, especially for somebody who takes the subway every day. I tried it out for the first time today, taking it from my bag and pressing a button and Shazam! (Or Kapow! for those who do not speak Turkish.) My book appears, magically, at the page where I left off.

It was at that moment, on the subway, that I noticed for the first time that not only did nobody else have a Kindle, but I had never seen anybody with a Kindle on the subway. (Strange, because Amazon makes you feel like you’re the last person on Earth to be reading off mutilated, processed rainforest wood that potentially held the cure for cancer but we’ll now never know because you had to find out what happens when Shopoholic Ties the Knot.)

I also noticed people openly staring not just at it, but at me for having it (I suppose they’d already read all the in-train advertisements for celebrity podiatrists.) Holding that thin, white case, I suddenly felt like I had been beamed there from the future to spy on 2009 Earthlings, trying to act all casual in my silver neoprene unitard while standing on a Segway, and trying to fit in by breezily and loudly mentioning, in Artoo Detoo beeps and boops, that I looked forward to reading my Jonathan Grisham novel.

Yes, it’s only day one and I’m addicted to this Kindle. I could barely even bring myself to read the newspaper today – my morning ritual – and that was on a day that a South Carolina Governor not only reappeared after a disappearance of many days, not only reemerged having been caught going to Argentina, not only admitted to having an affair, but, in what must have the nation writhing in voyeuristic ecstasy, the contents of his love emails were revealed. All that in today’s paper, and there I am at the kitchen table, reading (because it is in electronic format and thus suddenly cool) Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.

That isn’t to say that I didn’t take a few moments today to read all about the spectacularly ridiculous Governor Sanford. While my politics drift hither and thither at times, I know that I am still officially a Democrat when I grow giddy watching as the politicians who voted to impeach President Clinton get caught having affairs. There are few things more vindicating that watching hypocrisy exposed in politicians of whom you are not overly fond. That goes double for people like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and the suddenly wildly popular Glenn Beck – a man I wouldn’t recognize if he walked into my living room and threw pancakes at me – who had deemed the Governor’s disappearance as the liberal media making something out of nothing.

Ok, I’ll stop. I try to be a good Christian, believe it or not, and it seems decidedly unchristian to beat up on these folks on a blog that offers no balanced point of view. That’s their job.

Back to the Kindle. Finn saw it today, on the kitchen table, and seemed decidedly unimpressed with it. I first thought that that was because he was unable to stick it in his mouth, thus rendering it useless for all intents and purposes, but I now realize the reason may have been that he knows just how ancient this thing is going to look in photographs. It’s like seeing photos of yourself as a baby, with your father holding you in his arms and leaning, proudly, against some hideous new appliance – a microwave, perhaps – that looks like a set piece from Battlestar Galactica and the look on his face, the small smile, seems to marvel at the fact that his house is blessed with such a futuristic cooking device, and that mark his words, by this time next year they’ll be using Micro-Waves to warm up food pills in their pod in the U.S. Moon Colony.

So my plan, when I get home, is to hold Finn and the Kindle and have Liz take a photo for Finn’s baby book, that he can look back on in twenty years. Finn and I will be looking at the Kindle and laughing condescending, indicating just how embarrassingly out of date this “hot new technology” is, and then, in a subsequent photo, we will wrap out bodies in Saran Wrap and then doctor the photo to look like we are going for a stroll along the Valles Marineris in Mars’ southern hemisphere with our loyal robot dog (Emma in tin foil).

For now, though, the Kindle will do just fine.