Memories on a Shelf (Week 16 Prompt)

My reading swing, moved to my current home from
my parents home in Spencer, IN.

My early youth was spent in the barn with Wilbur and Charlotte, on the prairie with Ma, Pa, Mary and Carrie, and in a boxcar with a family of mystery-solving orphans.  My teen years found me commiserating with Margaret, and hanging out in a MicMac Indian burial ground that had been transformed into a Pet Sematary. The pages of the few books I owned became tattered and their covers fell off.  I spent a lot of time at the local library, and the best time of year for me was when the Scholastic Books fair came to school. I read for the fun of it and the love of it, and I couldn’t read enough.

I haven’t really thought much about how reading and books have changed for me, but reflecting back on my favorites as a child and some of my current favorites, I realize that my reading preferences haven’t changed much, they’ve just matured a little. I still adore books about children and animals, I love historical fiction (of any age level), and I still like books that are a little “out there,” but more along the lines of Kurt Vonnegut rather than Stephen King. I still read for fun. I still can’t get enough. 

Sadly, I rarely repeatedly read books that I currently own – but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's because there are so many good books out there to read, in so many formats, and life is short!! I am not picky about how I read books. Give it to me as an eBook, an audiobook, in print, even a pdf. In my youth, my reading was limited to what I owned, and what the school and local public libraries held in their collections. Now, with a vast number of books available to me, and numerable ways to get them, I take advantage of it all. 

If someone were to write a book on the future of books, it would fall under the “mystery” genre. No one knows! It's fair to say that digital media is changing the reading game and the future of books. When I was a child/teen, the Internet was just being conceived and reading a book on a phone wasn’t anything I could have fathomed. The closest thing I had to “digital media” was when I used my index finger to dial a number on our rotary phone to listen to the local library’s recorded story time. The audio books in my day were read-along Disney books that came with a 45RPM vinyl record. It sounds crazy to say but, somewhere in the future, whether it’s 20 or 50 years, I believe that eBooks will out-publish and outsell hard copies. I know that as a librarian, this borders on blasphemy, but at one point, someone thought that songs in mp3 form would never outsell CDs. My library discontinued CDs several years ago.

So, is digital media the only way of the future? I can't completely accept this theory. Why? Because I believe that we overestimate the longevity of digital media. We seem to fail to understand (or ignore the fact) that even digital media is not guaranteed to last forever. Computers crash. Hackers steal and scramble data. Backups are accidentally destroyed. Flash drives are damaged. Zombies may take over the world. For these reasons (okay, maybe not the Zombies), I don’t believe that books in print will ever completely go away. We NEED them. They are real, tangible. They keep our history whether in fact or in subject matter. And besides, we still like to line our walls with them. We still like to fall asleep with a book our chest. We like to read them, and pass them on to our friends and family. We hand down books as heirlooms, missing covers and all. We still love the feel, smell and look of a book. Books aren't just stories; they are memories on the shelf - of when you read it (it was a humid day, your boyfriend had just broken up with you, and you could barely see the pages for the tears), who you read it with (you and your BFF shrieked together when that evil cat came back to life), why you read it (because your English teacher made you and now you love her for it.) 

You always hear about people hugging books to their chests. No one ever hugs a Kindle. 

The last paragraph of Ursula K. Le Guin’s article “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading” really spoke to my heart. She says,

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind.

My reading swing - Spencer, IN
circa 1980.

While I am a fan of eBooks and moving forward with the times, Le Guin's words made me want to advocate strongly for books in print to carry forward well into the future and beyond. I want to know that 20 or more years from now, maybe another eight year-old girl will be sitting in the shade on the swing that her dad made for her in the walnut tree out back, lost in a tattered, well-loved copy of “Charlotte’s Web.” That's my memory on a shelf. I'd like to keep it there for the next person. 

My original copy given to me by my parents for Christmas in 1979.