The Kindle

For Christmas, Hewitt gave me a Kindle in my grab bag / Happy Birthday bag of gifts. And I love my Kindle, but sometimes I’m conflicted about it.

I love books, so for a long time, I didn’t even want a Kindle. I actually never even asked for it. But when my carry on is weighed down by approximately three 800 page books before our honeymoon… I think Hewitt knew my book habits did not make for sustainable travel.

Kindle Pros

It is light. It is small and easy to travel with. (These are obvious benefits.)

I think I might actually read faster on it for some reason – this is unsubstantiated because I don’t know how I would justify this claim, but it seems the pages melt away more quickly.

I can read the Kindle on the treadmill. I’ve always tried to flip through a book or magazine on the elliptical, but only the Kindle allows you to increase the font size so it’s legible while actually running, and it doesn’t require any form of book holder/page holding down device. It lays flat.

The books costs a bit less.

I feel pretty appropriate reading The New Digital Age on it.

It prevents me from filling our apartment to the brim with books.

Kindle Cons

It isn’t a real, traditional book.

I would remember when a character was introduced or an event occurred based on the thickness / page number. I could refer back to passages or confusing sections as needed pretty easily. I haven’t figured out how to do this with the Kindle. The highlighting feature would only work if I knew in advance that I would want to remember something later… and this isn’t always the case!

It prevents me from filling our apartment to the brim with books.

Overall– I love having a Kindle. It was a great gift I could probably have never managed to bring myself to ask for or buy on principle. But I love having it.

And when we have a bigger apartment or home, I’ll probably have to buy some of the e-books I’ve been reading to fill the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves I’m dreaming of…

Grace: A Memoir

I just finished one of my Christmas presents – Grace: A Memoir, by Grace Coddington, and it was delightful. Grace is the creative director at American Vogue and gives the reader an inside look into fashion, fashion photography, life at Vogue – British and American.

In addition to having exceptionally large type (somewhere around point size 16, if I had to guess), the book came complete with lovely illustrations by Grace. She claims to have read only 2 books in her lifetime without pictures in them, so I don’t mind her sharing her preferred medium of choice with me.

Through reading about who she has worked with – and it’s everyone, I learned a great deal about photographers I only vaguely recognized before, if at all. So when I saw  this month’s Hollywood Issue of Vanity Fair with “photographed by Bruce Weber” splashed on the cover, I had a moment in CVS of “Oh! I know him!” Of course, I don’t know him – but I did enjoy reading about him in Grace.

The book is different from many other memoirs I have read where the emotion and how this thing affected this part of me – in the deepest way, was missing. She suddenly mentions a terrible car wreck that sidelined her modeling career for a time and casually throws in later that when in another car crash, although more minor, she lost a baby and was never ever to conceive again. It seems there was plenty of untapped emotion to explore, but I suppose memoirs can be lighter and don’t always have to be gut wrenching and evocative, or something.

And since the book is interesting and delves into a world I knew little of the inner workings, and it also has photos, illustrations and a large font size… I would recommend. So let me know if you want to borrow it – this is one an e-reader simply wouldn’t do justice.