Battle of the Books

This weekend I held the enemy. A woman I sat next to was reading on her Kindle. Yes, she likes it, she said, but it's not as light as it looks. She thrust it toward me. I reached out, a little hesitant. If I touched it, what would happen?

Nothing, of course. The kindle was a bit heavier than I thought it would be. But books are heavy, too. It's not the weight of the thing that bothers me. It's the mutability. Is it Virginia Woolf or Barbara Kingsolver? Is it a comic book or a cook book or an ancient record book like the ones from Prague Castle pictured above? In books, the ideas get all mixed up with the paper they're printed on and that's how they become (for me, at least) almost holy things.