Out of sorts.
17 June 2010
It's official: I am out of sorts.
This is ridiculous, as nothing is overtly wrong with me, I am not homeless, and I had a good breakfast. Still. There is no other phrase to describe what I am. I am in the middle of about five books, all of which are okay (and one of which is pretty good, actually) but I am just not in the mood. I feel like you feel when you're having a particularly nasty spat with a loved one: you feel very wrong, but you don't know how to fix it, and you feel off because the person to whom you would normally talk about the spat you're having with someone is the someone you're having the spat with. This is how I feel about reading this week.
I am not mad at reading. I just feel like we're not connecting. And, as you know, reading is what I do for work, fun, and what I sneak in doing between work and fun. So when I'm feeling conflicted about reading, everything--and I mean everything--is off.
It doesn't help that most big librarian and publisher and blog stories I'm reading this week are about the relentless march of e-books. And here's what I notice about e-books: no one's ever talking about the BOOKS. They're talking about the gadget--the Kindle, the Nook, the iPad, etc., etc.--or they're talking about the ways to download your books onto your gadgets (Overdrive at the library? Wireless from Amazon? Public domain works? Is this software compatible with that gadget, and is the book you want available through that service?) Christ. It makes me so tired, literally. I KNOW that if people are reading e-books, they're still reading. I get that that's where we're going. But for someone who literally begrudges every single minute that they can't read, trying to navigate the nightmare of buying a device (and who has money for all this crap?) that will be obsolete in two years, necessitating a new purchase, as well as figuring out software? NO THANK YOU.
My. I know I shouldn't take it all so seriously. But sometimes I feel like the sailor in that Jimmy Buffett song: "his occupational hazard being, his occupation's just not around." I always wonder, too, if there was some poor bastard papyrus maker in ancient Egypt who loved making papyrus, and who lost his little papyrus shop when the codex took over. I feel very close to that ancient Egyptian.