I am a new Kindle reader, a not-early-yet-not-yet-late adopter, like I was with my Powerbook when it was grey and clunky and slowslowslow as a battleship and hardly something you would trade your PC for.Those were the days when laptops were so new that when I took mine from my Queens apartment to the neighborhood Wendy’s to write (this was also before Starbucks had taken hold in the East Coast) a middle aged couple come up to me and ask me what the machine was.Literally, what it was, what it did.I wonder if they remember that with the kind of “isn’t life amazing” grin that my father had the first time he used an ATM.

Now that I’m carrying the Kindle around with me everywhere, people are stopping at me at the beach in Geneva where I live, or leaning over in the airplane (such intimate spaces, they’re reading my books) or interrupting me while I read at lunch to ask about it.Like someone who has imported an unusual breed of dog I feel obligated to say a thing or two about what it is and why I like it.

And I really really like it.

The first week I got the Kindle was the week after the New Yorker published Nicholson Baker’s essay excoriating the machine.Since many of my literate friends subscribe to the New Yorker, many of my friends quoted his article.(I haven’t subscribed to the New Yorker since I realized I had 40 weeks of unread New Yorkers blocking my way to the bathtub, each one representing another week of not really being literate.I couldn’t stand the accumulated whispers from the pages, so I figured that I had to either stop bathing or cancel my subscription.Since the bath is where I do most of my reading, I couldn’t not bathe AND read the New Yorker.Logical impossibility.So the New Yorker went.)

In order to read Baker’s article, therefore, I waited until a friend here in Geneva could bring me a copy.She also brought me a commentary in a French magazine “Livres” or “Books”, and another in a Spanish magazine with the same subject matter, I don’t recall the title (my colleague reclaimed the magazines off my desk yesterday while I was on the phone discussing budget reconciliations).I can read both French and Spanish but it takes an effort and I am lazy, so I just glanced at them and saw all kinds of verb negation.They don’t like the Kindle either.So rather than reading them, I let them sit there to remind me that, despite my vast, unquenchable thirst for books, I will never really be literate.

Besides, whatever such writers may say, I’m really enjoying my Kindle.In fact, I’ve fallen in love with it.Which made me wonder why I could both love it and Nicholson Baker so much, yet we could so fundamentally disagree.

Here’s my thesis:it is about work.My job.My daily life. And its contrast with Baker’s job.

Baker has a job.He is a writer.All these commentaries have been written by writers.Professionals.On the one hand, thank goodness.If I want a commentary written by your uncle Fred, the one who talks at cocktail parties about how he is going to write a book someday, I can go on the Amazon website.He, or his facsimile, is all over the Amazon website, and I rely on him or his dopplegangers to tell me whether I want to buy things.But that is different than what I want to think about something.For that, good writers are key.Your uncle Fred is the reason I pay for magazines even if not the New Yorker—someone smarter than me has chosen the writers so I don’t have to suffer through amateurish prose.Like my own.

On the other hand, writers—although I love them and need them almost as much as farmers–are not real people with real jobs that require them to read powerpoints all day and fight human resources and IT and schlep all their gear on the bus to get to work 48 weeks out of the year, then come home and schlep the groceries and the children’s gear and be out of their houses for 14 hours a day.

Of course, that’s why writers aren’t like the rest of us.Thank goodness, or we would never have any reason to turn a page of anything more nuanced than a blender manual.But think about it.Writers like Nicholson Baker, assuming he has an office where he writes, and that office is full of books—Nicholson Baker and most writers I know are never far from their libraries.They work where they store their books.Their work directly involves reading.

Real reading.

My work involves reading too.Vast amounts of it.I have a stack of paper 4 inches high on the right-hand side of my desk, all of which involves reading.Alas, in that pile is a 24 page description of a project awaiting my commentary—the 24 pages is the required response by the project office.An elaborate form, in fact.Needs my John Hancock.There is a pdf of a 72 page contract of a partnership agreement from which I need to glean and disseminate the relevant clauses to satisfy senior colleagues that our data is secure.On my computer, are more documents to be read and printed—357 emails to be exact, at least 20 of them that contain forms of more than 6 pages to be digested (if I don’t read them and they contain information I need, I’m screwed) and probably 12 Powerpoints that people now write to avoid having to write or read so much text.

To the left of my chair a real life book (a hardback, with shiny new dust jacket!) holds a place of honor—“Money Well Spent,” by Paul Brest of the Hewlett Foundation.It discusses methods to analyze organizational impact in nonprofits and how to make funding decisions based on that impact.I have been putting off reading it because it requires the kind of close study that, say, a new paper on calcium distribution in mollusk shell formation might require for a marine biologist.I’m looking forward to the intense concentration that such a book requires, once I’ve read the contracts, emails and Powerpoints.And written my own.I think I’m due to write 4 or 5 Powerpoints this week. But the book sits on my desk as a promise of sustained attention, as a grappling with well-reasoned ideas, and also, honestly, as a symbol to people who walk in:you are in the office of an up-to-date professional who reads real BOOKS.

But, of course, none of these things are actually reading.Not what Nicholson Baker considers real reading, nor what those of us in the cult of readers—the many millions of us who cannot imagine being without a book, or several, to transport us somewhere else—consider reading.Most of us, even if we’re reading the New Yorker daily, don’t consider magazines real reading either.That’s just ocular nerve information absorption.Real reading requires books, and thus it is books we crave.Lots of books, from a vast variety of genres.Each with its own subculture and expectation of the experience.Mystery readers expect to find order.Western readers expect to find testosterone-laden justice.Contemporary fiction readers expect to feel enlightened by some new subject, shadenfreude for the terrible life we’re not living. Romance readers expect to feel warm, maybe even hot when they are done reading.There’s more we get from , of course.Enlightenment, meditation.Information carefully researched about a subject—banana growing in the 19^th century—but imagining, and the feelings that go with that imagining—that’s what I need most.

My subcult is loosely defined by contemporary literary fiction, dipping occasionally into literary nonfiction, sci fi, mystery, historical fiction, and self help.The common thread is that it has to be well written (even the self help, although there’s more license for ick there—it is a placebo for real self work) and it has to feed my hunger of the moment.For order—the mysteries of Kate Atkinson.For sci-fi expansion—China Mieville.For other lives—well, Nicholson Baker will do very nicely.

My pile of yet-to-be-read books lets me to feel wealthy and secure, even when patently not either.Few things make me feel poorer or more insecure than having nothing to read.Like having nothing to wear on my brain.

Unfortunately, for my whole working life (25 years now), I have gone into the office, found myself surrounded by professional manuals and documents during the work hours, occasionally have found myself with a few minutes of time at lunch when I could read, say, a few paragraphs of a sci fi novel over lunch, only to find that I packed “Middlemarch”.When you want to read Jane Austen and the zombies, plain old Jane Austen just won’t do.I’ve often looked in my briefcase and found that I’ve chosen a book for reasons that have nothing to do with my real reading desires: the Millenium Trilogy is too thick to fit in my briefcase; I couldn’t find the novel on nuclear physics, “The Sun and the Moon Corrupted”, as I was rushing out the door; I am embarrassed to read “Think and Grow Rich” in public; only a fanatic would take Mark Bittman’s cookbook tomes on the bus).Every day there is a small repetition of that basic disappointment—I have nothing to read. I am thirsty for literature and have to ignore that thirst, instead staying at my desk and wading through its contents.

It is certain that, since I’ve gotten the Kindle, I have read more than before, as I squeeze what I really want to read into the small crevices of my life.

So why is Baker so worried?Well, there’s the loss of paper information, which is worrying—someone controls those servers, and someone can determine what you’re reading.No need for Farenheit 457—just get the Chinese censors over here.There’s the technology, which is far from perfect.There’s the choice of books, which is annoying, but is changing daily.

What seems to worry Baker the most, though, is the loss of the book as an object of beauty.As someone who gets to handle his books on a daily basis, who toils away in the psychic space of a blank page, or screen, who spends months on a book that we can read in a matter of hours (Baker’s books are all tremendously slim) is that through the Kindle–mine now loaded with about 35 books of multiple genres—the book as object is clearly critical.

After all, if each book looks the same on a screen, aren’t all books interchangeable?Will books become a commodity when they lose their corporeal form, their beauty?

Alas, for someone like me—a working mother in the middle class—most books already long ago lost their beauty as objects.Until recently, when I moved to a non-English-speaking country, I bought almost all my books second hand.That means that when I read Baker’s “Fermata” (a story of a young man who can stop time, and uses this great power to undress the women in his office—a brilliant look at the erotic and our imaginations) it was most likely in a coffee-stained paperback version, filled with the detritus of all unputdownable books–dandruff, salad dressing, the insect instinctively squashed when it flew between the pages.I don’t remember.Not even the cover.What I remember is being transported back to the days when I was a secretary, and the outrageousness of Baker’s ambition, and the way he slowed down time and allowed the mildly shocking to take place in a syrup of languor, and the timbre of his obnoxious narrator whose voice I can still replay if I sit quietly enough.

It was Baker’s words that kept me trapped in the fictional dream.The vessel is entirely lost to me.Likely, had I read it in a pdf format, in a printout in the pile of my desk, his skill would have transported me just the same.

Only… maybe not.The interesting thing about the Kindle, and maybe other book readers as well (this is not a product ad and I haven’t tried more than one book reader) is that is enough like a book that my brain simply seems to cue “book” when I open the cover and turn it on.Just like when I lie down on the bed with my children, I am signaling “story time” and they come out of their bunkbeds and are finally quiet for the first time all day and lie down looking at the pages like they always have although—now we’ve graduated to chapter books—there are no longer pictures to see.Maybe it is the Kindle’s grey pages (most of my books’ pages are actually slightly yellow), or the size of it, or the heft.Probably it has to do with the typesize I’ve chosen that allows me to read enough lines across and down a page to feel like a book.It definitely has to do with how you hold it—not a phone, not a computer.Whatever the mechanism, I’m able to induce the reader’s dreamstate with it.

What the book reader surpasses in normal books is the simple choice of which dream I follow.I genuinely wish that Roberto Bolano’s “2666” were on the Kindle.I bought it in hardback, but even in paperback I would have been unwilling to drag all 800 pages of it to the beach yesterday—8 blocks on foot with the swimgear of a family of four, toys and the picnic supper—although I knew I would have the longest interlude of reading all week while there.I was too tired.I had already hauled my laptop to work, my groceries from the market with the laptop and briefcase on my back.What I wanted to accompany me to the lake was the complex pattern that Bolano has begun to weave for me.But I couldn’t.I physically couldn’t face another two pounds of weight.So I took “The Sun and the Moon Corrupted” instead, which wasn’t a bad choice after all.But still—when can I read Bolano? In the bathtub, with it propped up on one knee, I guess. When I am home. I won’t be taking it on the 25 hours of airplane flights I have these next ten days to and from Singapore, and Jakarta—it is just too hard to run full speed through Charles de Gaulle airport with all that luggage (I always have to run through Charles de Gaulle airport, regardless of how well I schedule my flights).

Oh, I don’t want to take my dictionary too, now that I have rediscovered the delight of really looking things up in the dictionary when you want the nuance of the word. As I said before—I am lazy, and getting out of the bath to lookup a word is not a possibility. Nor is hauling a dictionary. Nor turning on my computer.But with the Kindle, I move the (admittedly awkward) mouse to the word, let it sit, and Voila! a brief definition.This week I looked up “avatar” (I only knew the word in its computer sense, not its Hindu origins), “concupiscence” (never really knew what it meant, only a general sense of licentiousness), and “middlebrow” (just because it popped to mind and I wanted to know what Oxford New English dictionary said).I confess to rarely looking up words when I should.Maybe I can resubscribe to the New Yorker now.

If books become a commodity—as interchangeable as oranges, or steel, or grains of wheat–it will be because we have failed our authors, we have stopped reading well, we have stopped talking about books, we have stopped editing them with care.Not because we read them with love and a new tool.

Never mind the Kindle’s interface (it works fine), the grey pages (I didn’t even notice until someone pointed it out), the way of changing pages (yes, BUT you can do it with the pad of your thumb while holding it, never moving a muscle, perfect for having two kids on your lap talking to one another about computer games while occupying the valuable real estate of mama’s lap), the proprietary software of Amazon (troublesome in some distant future, although Baker has it right), the less-than-perfect design (my ugly grey Powerbook has evolved to my husband’s sleek MacBook, and when Apple gets their reader out… ah…) the book reader, in this case the Kindle, lets me read.

It lets me read in the tiny tesseracts of time that occasionally unfold in front of me. It lets me choose what to read in a life where so often what to read is required by some faceless other: (who is the head of the efficiency transition reporting team who insists I approve this? Doesn’t matter.Must needs.)It lets me fill my life, just a little bit more, with the heroin of literature.It gives my brain something to wear.It helps slake my thirst.And that’s 90% of what I need, really need, from my books.The other 10% is a question for another day.