Stacked. | #KISS Blog No. 73

When I was around 18, I forgot my backpack next to a park bench (ah, young love), then came back five minutes later to find it was gone. It had a lot of my stuff in there, but the one I regretted losing most was my Kindle.

Battered as it was, must've been a few years old by then. Quite a few, though that made it all the more important to me. The money, my ID, clothes, whatever other stuff I had in there didn't come close to that loss. I replaced it immediately with the one I have know, which I christened Brand New Start. At 18 with no steady job, the hundred or so bucks a new Kindle cost was a huge purchase, though luckily I was babysitting for extremely generous people at the time, so that year's Christmas bonus pretty much covered my acquisitions. Thank god, I don't think I could've lived without it.

That's actually the first chapter of my book that's coming out in 10 days! Yey!

There seems to be quite a bit of debate going around over e-books vs. "real" books these days, with many booklovers proclaiming to be either one or the other. Maybe it's the fact that I've never been too keen on taking sides, or rather, choosing one party over another, that I'm having a hard time choosing.

I love both. I love all books. I'd probably love books if they came in tablet form. They're very important and dear to me, and my trade, and my passion (which also happens to be my trade). So I think it's be a little selfish of me to take sides.

I love my Kindle for when I travel for longer than a few days and don't wanna have to pack a shit ton of heavy books.

I love my Kindle when I wanna lay on my side in bed, reading, and not have to worry about holding the book.

I love my Kindle because e-books are a hell of a lot cheaper than paperbacks.

I also love real books, as it were. For the feel. I like the sensation of sitting in an easy chair, with a real, proper book cradled in my lap. I recently rediscovered the pleasure of voraciously devouring a fantasy book (Leviathan Wakes, first book in the Expanse Series) in physical form, as opposed to digital. Kinda made me want to get the other 9 books in the series in physical format, too, though when I found out it was like $25 for a paperback (a lot in Romania), I passed. But there's something I love and that keeps me faithful to proper, flip-your-own-damn-pages books. That you don't get with e-books, sadly. If they could nail that (and the smell), I reckon it's be a goldmine, though.

Actually not my bookcase. My aunt's. Runs in the family.

Anyway, this isn't me yapping on for no reason. It's actually a response to this week's MINIMALIST theme, asking the age-old question, though clearly from a minimalist perspective. Obviously, a voracious reader like myself amasses a lot of books. Which take up space, not to mention create clutter.

Yet books are the one aspect of my existence where minimalism can not apply. I adore books. Aesthetically speaking.I'm looking at a 15-book stack on my left as I type this. There's another book next to that and another to my right. For once, there seem to be none on my bed. While I love a clean, minimalist decor, books are an object of such beauty that I could stare at stacks and stacks of them forever. I've seen few things that compare to the beauty of a small, crowded second-hand bookstore that's stacked floor to ceiling with books. There's a lovely one in Edinburgh, reminiscent of the famous Shakespeare and Company in Paris, that's just like that. Just books everywhere you can cram them. I could say that's like porn to me, but that would be reductive. There's bells that go off when I walk into a place like that, even though you gotta stick your back to the wall of books to allow another person to move past. I could do that all day.

Only once, in Glasgow I think, did a bookstore strike me as too messy, and even then, what bothered me was the lack of order. When there's three stacks of books one in front of the other (all across the bookstore), you better have an order, otherwise there's no one digging for the bottom row of that back stack.

But generally speaking, I love book stacks. I always have. I've picked out these nice, simple wooden shelves for my place. Quite roomy, almost to the point where I thought...what if I haven't got enough books for them? The answer was fairly evident -- get more books then. Duh.

So while there's people perfectly happy choosing one or the other, I don't think that could ever be me. I don't see a reason for ditching real books, even supposing I could. Just because the e-book offers certain technical advantages, it doesn't mean bidding goodbye to the old, does it? :)

Thanks @millycf1976 and @minimalistliving for making my brain work.