books for babies

[metaphortunate]

Oh, bookstores. We've had some good times together, you and I, haven't we? Half Price Books in Houston, I remember so many long afternoons spent hidden in your stacks reading and rereading your strangely complete Dykes To Watch Out For collection. I apologize for never buying a one of them, but I was still living at home; books about lesbians were not really something I could have owned back then. God knows I bought plenty of other books from you, though. Stars Our Destination in Chicago, how I remember the long ride up to the north side of the city to go to my first Friends of Lulu meeting in you. I remember musing on the message of the change Alice Bentley had made to the title of Bester's book. Dear bookstores. I will miss you when you go. Stars Our Destination is gone already. Dreamhaven is barely open. Alan Beatts of Borderlands sees the writing on the wall.

But I know you are going, dear bookstores, because no one loves you more than me, and even for me, the one and only reason at this point why I ever shell out extra cash and storage space for a physical book over an e-book is the Junebug.

The Junebug is why I sometimes grit my teeth and close my Kindle window and resign myself to not reading a book until that day maybe weeks or months from now until I find the time to get by a bookstore - if the bookstore even has the book I want, which it probably won't, and Amazon temptingly always does, literally 90 seconds away. See, I grew up in a forest of books. My parents' books surrounded me on all sides. There were the books I picked out from the library, sure, and occasionally even from bookstores, but there were also the ones that I never, ever would have chosen for myself, yet I read them and read them and learned so much because they were right there, in my bedroom, whenever I was bored. Ralph Waldo Emerson. The complete works of Lewis Carroll and the collected stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. The complete works of Oscar Wilde. David Copperfield. John Holt. 500 old copies of National Geographic. I never would have chosen them for myself. If I had had to ask my parents to borrow them, I probably wouldn't have: how could I have justified it? I didn't have a reason, I didn't really know what I was reading, if god forbid there were any SEX in the book and my parents had asked me why I was reading it I would have died of modesty. But there was no barrier to entry for these books, none at all. And so I was rich.

How can I make that happen for the Junebug with e-books? I need a way. ("Never buy anything with DRM on it" is not a realistic way.)

Comments

[lovepeaceohana]

I feel like I have not adequately thought this out - I've always been the reader in my family, the book-collector, and now that I am grown and married to a partner who came with his own library, we have begun to prune, and prune, because we are renters and physical books are so heavy. And yet we keep buying more picture books for the kids, because picture books are beautiful, and I find that what I'm actually doing is just recreating the library of titles I remember from childhood and adding ones I wish I'd had. I guess I'm hoping they'll just get used to the feel of paper in their hands and the reading of words from paper and get into it that way? I have so many books that I've saved or purchased anew that I loved at various ages throughout my life that I can't wait to pass on to them, it'd be a shame to lose them to e-versions (if those even exist for some of the titles!).