Callie Enlow

People frequently ask me what I think about the Kindle, which is maybe just a standard ice-breaker these days and maybe due to my sometime association with the dying print journalism medium (which is like an abusive relationship you keep going back to because the abuser is dying so you feel sort of sorry for it and then it just disappoints you again and you’re like ‘that is IT dude, never again, just die already and let me pursue a healthy life with Mr. PR,’ and as soon as you say that you feel bad and the cycle renews itself because you secretly hope it’s not dying at all).

So, anyway, this was likely a sorry line of conversation because I don’t have much to say on the Kindle at all. My biggest pro/con scenarios were like: PRO: If you’re a professor travelling on a research grant/fellowship, you can pack all your books into one teeny Kindle. That seems pretty great. CON: You cannot read it in the bathtub. However, I am not a professor on a travel grant and I’m more of a shower person, so I personally don’t have a lot invested in these scenarios or the Kindle/real book thing.

HOWEVER, yesterday on my 4-5 hour drive home from my parents’ I started listening to the audiobook of Freedom by Jonathan Franzen that my dad lent me. I got about 30 percent through (it’s pretty long!) and when I pulled into the driveway, I was a little beside myself. Here I was really hooked on self-loathing Patty Berglund’s autobiography, but unless I started driving to California, I couldn’t realistically see how to finish the audiobook immediately. I tried to listen to it on our playstation, the only CD player in our house, but when Ben came home I had to turn it off. Not that he would complain, but I imagine coming home to your fiancee blaring a half-finished novel about a crumbling marriage over the playstation would be somewhat unsettling for Ben.

But because I was hooked in that way that you get with good novels, ordering the book online or waiting until the next day to track down the one bookstore still open for business in San Antonio seemed very cruel. Finally it dawned on my that I could install the Kindle App on my mac book, so I did and then ordered Freedom and have been very unproductive ever since.

Now I can add “when you can’t keep driving but your audiobook is REALLY good and you lost your CD walkman 15 years ago” to the pro-side for the Kindle.

I am fortunate to have a technical writing job which requires me to research and write about all sorts of contemporary writers, from philosophy professors to novelists to trapeze artists. Here are some books I’ve heard of via this project which sound interesting:

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating:

A mixture of memoir with naturalism, Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s book has received high praise from literary critics, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome patients (Bailey suffers from this disease and it’s critical in the memoir), and naturalists alike.

You Lost Me There:

Mainly, I’m just jealous of the author’s name: Rosecrans Baldwin. You can’t lose with a name like that. This book is receiving mixed reviews, some very very high praise and some that toss the novel out as melodrama. However, as an exploration of memory with a narrator who learns just how unreliable his narration is, I think this sounds fascinating.