Diana McCaulay

My husband and two sisters gave me a Kindle for my birthday last month, along with a $50 book voucher. Some context: I am not a lover of gadgets. Once, my husband gave me an electronic Sudoku gizmo and I was never able to figure it out – caused a certain amount of domestic strain. I refused to carry a cell phone for years after they had become common. I finally acquired a very basic job with a phone card, for use only on dark country roads on the occasion of a flat tyre. It never had any credit. When my friends had graduated to smart phones, my phone remained as dumb as a rock – functional, but inflexible. I have graduated to a BlackBerry (the very name grates), but most of its little icons remain a mystery. Every time my computer demands an update, I’m annoyed. New software means weeks of gritted teeth. You get the picture.

So I’ve resisted the electronic book, even as I’ve accepted its inevitability. Just not for me, I thought. Give me real books, I thought, as I browsed in bookstores. Give me real books – ouch! My back! – I thought, as I carried a full backpack on trips. OK, maybe an e-book WOULD be good for travelling. I picked them up in big bookstores – sterile things, I thought them. Then I considered the trees that had fallen for the paper books I loved, the air miles clocked to deliver them around the world. In short, I dithered.

And then my family took matters in hand (thank you, guys) and my Kindle arrived. It has a salmon pink cover with a neat little strap to hold it closed. There is a light which slides into one corner for reading in a power cut. (It’s not for that? Really?) The Kindle is light – much lighter than some of the books I buy. There’s a little switch on the bottom that you slide to wake it up – happily there’s a little message to remind you of the procedure when you open the cover. Before it wakes up, the screen has a picture, often of a dead white author – Agatha Christie, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain. Sometimes the picture is of an unknown machine – is this a subliminal message, I wondered, from the machines? We’re good people… believe in us… you are getting sleepy… sleepy.

So anyway, my Jamaican sister was pressed into service to get the thing working, she being a computer person (IT Consultant, as she would have it) and we sat at my computer and she pressed buttons and consulted the get-started manual and zipped around website pages, occasionally making noises which, if rendered visually, would involve a question mark floating above her head, while I sat there thinking, there are no such hurdles with buying or reading a real book…

Truth is, I felt inadequate. Like being in a statistics class or one of those elite gyms where the women look like insects with teeny bodies and giant heads. Just not up to the mark.

My sis prevailed and my first Kindle book appeared – Jennifer Egan’s A visit from the Goon Squad. OK, that was kind of a miracle. To sit at home, decide you want a book, press a few buttons, and the book appears in your salmon pink thingy. I turned the Kindle on. I shut the cover. I woke it up. Oooh look, there’s Henry David himself. I turned a page. I turned another page. I insisted on viewing the cover – that involved a few more metaphorical question marks floating around in the ether, more button clicking, more web pages. Eventually the cover was located. “That’s it,” my sis pronounced and departed. I put the Kindle on my pile of books to be read, thinking how it could, ALL BY ITSELF, become my pile of books to be read. “Aren’t you going to read it?” my husband said.

“Soon,” I said. “Soon.”