Candice Bushnell books have crabs

Click through for a larger image and to judge my taste in books

If the old adage is correct, this picture should be worth 50% of my assessment for this component of my English subject (which is going to take over the blog for a little while. As opposed to the echoing silence which was previously in command)

In this picture we can see:
My book collection, obvs.
Four elephants.
Three giraffes.
Two Eleventh Doctors.
One Ood.
One Captain Jack Sparrow.
One crazy cat lady.
One painting, a housewarming present from my aunt.
Hours of time wasted maintaining the chromatic arrangement of my books, at least half of which were spent trying to figure out where silver fits in the colour spectrum.
And KARL, Sofa of Legend.

One of the teachers for this course mentioned 'books as furnishings' last week, and I had a bit of a guilty vision of this bookcase, which is probably (next to KARL) the focal point of our flat. I don't think there's anything WRONG with that, but the presence of the Books sometimes does make me nervous that I'm not living up to their high standards. I've heard the Wiley Style Manual muttering about my cavalier attitude towards the distinctions between 'that' and 'which', and I know for a fact that Annie Proulx and Philip Roth have been complaining about how much time I spend slumped on the sofa not doing anything of any use to anybody with an interest in the nuances of The Human Experience.

This is probably why I'm so keen on ebooks now. Files can't judge you for listening to Blink 182 even though it's 2010. (I HATE YOU ALL, YOUR MOM'S A WHORE - how can you NOT want to listen to that?) There are a couple of branches to the 'ebooks are sucky IRL books FTW' argument, all of which annoy me.

1) Books smell good.

Yes, they do. If I rub my face in Roland Barthes he does indeed have a faintly musty smell. That's awesome. But I don't read books by pressing them against my nose. And I suffer from quite severe allergies.

Tangent: when I worked at the second hand bookstore a customer once asked me in a secretive murmur, what kind of parasites lived in the books?
Err, silverfish? But they're not really a parasite, as such...
No no, not silverfish, something small and itchy.
Uhh... where did you come into contact with this... creature?
At Berkelouw's.
Right. Did you sit on the sofas?
Oh, yes, but it was the books...
Pretty sure books don't harbour crabs, lady. Candice Bushnell's might.
But I was handling all those old books and...
Sofa. Fleas. You have fleas, from the sofa. Books don't have fleas. BTW, don't touch me.

But you know what? Files don't have silverfish OR crabs. And spiders can't hide behind them.

2) 'I don't fancy curling up in bed with an iPad.'

My hands aren't small, right, they're normal adult sized hands. But in the same way that I have trouble reaching all the notes required for a dramatic chord in Beethoven, I sometimes find books a bit weighty. The week after I read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I couldn't get the lid off anything. Ebook readers are designed so you forget you're reading an ebook. I was reading a book on my iPhone this morning and at one point I flopped it over to have a look at the blurb. If you can't forget the medium you're reading in, you're doing it wrong.

PLUS I know that one day I'll be able to open a French book in an ebook reader and when I come upon a word or phrase I don't know I'll be able to highlight it and search for it instantly, and that the application will save the definition for me so the next time I see it it'll know what it means. This is what I call 'convenient' and what other people have called 'an eternal state of distraction which prevents meaningful involvement with the text'. My film lecturers are all 'Don't watch the films on your computer because you'll just be answering your email and checking your bookfaces every five seconds and you won't be able to EXPERIENCE the EXPERIENCE so instead stay behind on Monday night until 7.30pm watching them in this cold musty room, k?' and I'd be interested to know if English lecturers have a similar problem with ebooks.

Link to an excellent and amusing grammar lesson I have unsuccessfully tried to teach to my students. Also this blog entry is not actually intended to be part of my assessment submission.