Craving A Book…The Real Kind

I am taking a break from A Song of Ice and Fire and dove back into the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear. Just finished An Incomplete Revenge. Excellent…a solid, well told mystery with well developed characters and a bit of history and psychology woven throughout. I bought a two-book bundle from Amazon so I have the next one, Among the Mad, ready to go when I need a gardening break today.

Or…I might read something else. The last five books I’ve read have been on the Kindle. I mostly read them on my iPad but I am finding that increasingly distracting. I’ll read a chapter and then check Facebook or Twitter or try to beat that last level on My Kingdom for a Princess. At night, I read from the real Kindle, and I do like the way it syncs between devices. But I think I am mostly craving a real book, one with pages that feeds the tactile senses. One that doesn’t have other content loaded on it, calling to me.

I practiced bookstore tourism this week, stopping at Blue Whale Books in Charlottesville to browse and buy a few books. I fed my nature and books collections and was charmed by the discovery of Sixpence House: Lost In a Town of Books by Paul Collins. It describes Collins’ move to Hay-on-Wye, the bookstore town in Wales. I made the pilgrimage to Hay when I was in Wales and have often imagined what it would be like to live in a place where you could slip into a bookstore every day just to browse.  Maybe I’ll dig into what the Boston Globe called “the bookworm’s answer to A Year in Provence.” (I know I have read that book but it must have been pre-Library Thing as it’s not in my reading list.)

On a side note: one of my favorite children’s authors died yesterday. I must have read From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler 25 times when I was a kid in a small country village imagining life in New York City. I reread it when I started teaching middle school and was delighted all over again. E.L. Konigsburg had a wonderful sense of mystery, magic and wonder.

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