Drunken E-Reader Rant!

HELLOOOOO!

Today was the busiest day of the year for Booky Wooks, and it was past midnight by the time I got home, so I am unwinding and settling my slightly frayed nerves with my good buddy Jameson and my Joker shot glass. Soooo…this is going to be a drunken rant! Bottoms up, bitches!

Batman says: Stay hydrated!

By the by, I’ve been thinking for a long time that I should do Drunk Dee video rants on this blog, and though I’ve talked myself out of it thus far, the idea seems more and more appealing, so be ready for it on the horizon.

Now that my breath could probably start a fire if I tried to blow out a match, I find myself wondering what I’m going to rant about. I’m probably just going to let my fingers fly, see what comes out, and hopefully not post this while still drunk so I can edit anything too ridiculous out of it. As Hemingway instructs, “write drunk, edit sober.”

I’ve never written drunk. I’ve always steered clear of my fiction while intoxicated, and that’s probably for the best. At the risk of sounding pretentiously meta, I would not want to deal with Demetrius while intoxicated. I wouldn’t be able to get the voice right.

Ooh, I could rant about e-readers!

Okay, I know that sounds boring, but bear with me. As I mentioned in a previous post, The Boyfriend bought me a Nook Colour for my birthday. As a cashier at Booky Wooks, I had had many discussions about e-readers with customers before I ended up with one. And though I was in the company of mostly older people who vehemently shun technology along with any sort of forward thinking, I was firmly Pro Page (physical books) for a long time. For me, reading was a visceral experience. I love the smell of new books, love to crack open the spine, love to turn pages and scribble little notes in the margins.  I even wrote a haiku, one of the two teensy pieces of writing I’ve ever had “published” on some online journal (wow, how proud am I about that) that touched on the subject:

On First Holding an E-Reader

The dusty fragrance

of hours turning pages

is obsolete now.

Ooooh. Chills, right? I am totally the next Sylvia Plath. Damn it, I hate poetry. And yet it’s the only thing I’ve ever gotten “published.” Argh. Anyway, self-pitying digression…

The point is that I was very, very Pro Page. If I were going to get an e-reader, I would only use it for travel, you know, when I was on a plane and needed to pack efficiently, or when I was on vacation and needed multiple books at my disposal. There was no way I would bring an e-reader with me everywhere. How would I know how far through the book I was? My eyes would end up hurting! Lack of awesome book smell and the sound of pages sliding against each other!

Behold, my awesome and...now apparently obsolete and discontinued...Nook Color!

But I have to tell you…without indenting my paragraphs today, apparently…once I actually got an e-reader, I fucking fell in love. I’m drinking the e-reader Kool Aid. Smooth, tingly, 80 proof e-reader Kool Aid.

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before in Bite Me or if I’ve just ranted about it to people physically surrounding me, but I was a bookworm throughout my childhood and adolescence, and for some reason college put that part of me to sleep. I mean, I still read, constantly, but it was always crap I was supposed to read. My little black heart wasn’t in it. Even if the books being prescribed to me were good books, I didn’t enjoy it. Call it juvenile, but for some reason, I just hate being told what to do. “Oh, make me read Lord of the Flies, will you? A masterpiece, you call it? Fuck you! I won’t enjoy it til I’ve re-read it two years out of high school!” You can call it juvenile because it totally is. I hate that about me but it’s there. I’ve held onto some of the books I was forced to read in college because I knew I’d probably enjoy them once I re-read them later (those titles include Comfort Women, Chicken with Plums, Jerusalem, and Atonement, to name a few. But for the record, no amount of time will make me enjoy anything written by Virginia freaking Woolf).

Ladies and gentlemen, the aesthetic paragraph break.

Is it weird that I’m nearly all Italian in genetics but I prefer Irish whiskey?

My grandma ought to smack me with a Hot Wheels track.

Anyway, the point of that semi lengthy paragraph was that I pretty much stopped reading for pleasure for five years, something I while in high school could never have guessed would have happened. I mean, I read, I distinctly remember reading books outside of classes, but they were exclusively books I’ve already read a thousand times--the Merry Gentry series, Phantom, Frankenstein--or books on writing, which for some reason I thought would boost my creativity (they don’t. They really don’t. They help in their way, but they can easily just be another distraction away from actually writing. It’s like watching a movie marathon to “prepare” to act in film.) Once I moved down to Columbus and got out of the college environment, I did end up starting to read more, every night before bed. But it wasn’t until The Boyfriend put a Nook into my hands that I truly fell back into my old habits, which were basically reading during every spare split second I had to spare.

Dude, I am reading so much that I am failing to come up with a proper metaphor for my reading. Reading black hole? Reading Downward Spiral? I’m the Trent Reznor of bookworms? I have been reading full length novels in a few days. The Boyfriend complains that I don’t spend any time with him, that I’m always on my Nook just reading and reading and reading. Hell, I’m even neglecting Facebook and Pinterest to read. I bought Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour a few days ago and I’m already about four hundred pages in, and that’s with a full time job and spending most of my time off sleeping! I’ve rediscovered Bookworm Dee, whom I hadn’t even really realized had gone dormant for so many years. And it’s all thanks to owning an e-reader.

Apparently, I’m not alone in this. When I realized that I had started reading a fuck ton more with an e-reader, I started asking coworkers and customers who were buying e-reader-related products if they found themselves reading more often with their devices than they had before with physical books, and the answer is always the same: their appetite for reading has become voracious since adding an e-reader to their reading repertoire.

Dude, auto correct totally saved my ass. I’m too drunk to spell repertoire.

So this begs the question, what is it about an e-reader that makes people read more? Because it does. I’m sorry, Pro Pagers, but I have an absolutely perfect focus group as a Booky Wooks employee, and it’s true. Is it because we Millennials are so dependent on technology that an e-reader gives us the only appropriate medium through which to experience the written word, if that’s grammatically correct? No, I definitely don’t think so. I loves me some technology, but I’d always been Pro Page pre Nook, and so had many others who now own Nooks, Kindles, and Ipads. Honestly, I have two easily-recognizable words for why e-readers make people read more: Instant gratifications.

Seriously, instant gratification is all it takes, I think. With e-readers, you can buy the book you want and have it in your hands, ready to read, in an instant. I have no idea how many books have slipped through my fingers in previous years just because I couldn’t remember them from the point of thinking, Hey, this book sounds interesting, to physically getting to the bookstore. Or how many times I’ve put a book on my Amazon.com wish list (fuck Amazon) and decided I didn’t want to pay the shipping cost or that I didn’t have the money for it right now. So much knowledge, gone!

Yeah...it's a long, complicated story.

With my Nook, I click ‘purchase’ and the book is there immediately. Like I said, a few nights ago, I bought The Witching Hour. That came from an hour long session of browsing around conversations on goodreads.com (seriously, an awesome site) and realizing how much her Vampire Chronicles had impacted me as both a writer and a personality. I wanted more. So I bought the entire Mayfair Witches series. Bam. Five seconds. Maybe not the best financial choice, but hey, I’m expanding my mind here. If I had even waited for the end of my shift the next day to purchase the series, I probably would have backed out, waiting for some ‘better time’ to delve into a new series, and I might never have gotten to them. Now getting through the first book has become an utter obsession.

Pre-Nook but post-college, I probably slugged through maybe a book a month, and those were often books I’ve already read. In seven weeks of owning a Nook, I’ve read eight freaking books, all over 200 pages. I still dream of someday having a personal library with shelves of books that span walls from floor to ceiling, but I am a fan of the e-reader. I adore it. If you are a person who considers themselves Pro Page, I would still recommend an e-reader to you. Come on, take a walk on the dark side. We have literacy!

Yup...still a literary wet dream for me!

All right, I’m going to go ahead and abandon post. I’m to the drunk point where the world has a lovely dizzy haze over it and I have to pee every five seconds, which seriously interrupts my creative flow.

Argh, I said flow. I have to pee! 

Drunk Dee out.