books: October 2005 Archives

Books are too charming and too sensuous to ever give up. Maybe people said the same thing about painting on cave walls, and I’m just revealing myself as a creature of my culture -- I dunno. But as useful as it is to read stuff on a screen, “curling up with a good PDA” just doesn’t have quite the ring to it that it should. I dream of a time when the visceral experience of reading a book merges with the practicality (and tree-saving-ness) of electronic books: In my fantasy world, people own one “book,” a gorgeous volume, beautifully bound, that’s comfortable and easy to hold, that you can take in the bath or into bed -- or up a tree -- with you. The pages of this “book” feel like paper, and you read by turning page after page, just like you do with a low-tech book of paper pages. But the pages in my fantasy book are rewritable -- you download text as you need it, and hopefully you could carry around your whole library in this one electronic volume. But even if a book could only hold one novel that’d get wiped out when you loaded the next one, it’d still be cool: your library at home could be stored on a single hard drive into which you plug your book when you need something new to read.

Newspaper headlines don’t get much more dire than this:

World Helpless Against Assaults of Nature

I mean: Wow. The Associated Press’s Calvin Woodward just kinda dives right into the deep end of the panic-and-depair pool:

WASHINGTON -- In a more hopeful time, buoyed by the promise of science, it was thought hurricanes could be tricked into dispersing, earthquakes could be disarmed by nuclear explosions and floodwaters held at bay by great mounds of dirt.

Rich and poor nations have taken the hit over a period so twisted in nature's assaults that one month, rich is helping poor and the next, poor is helping rich as best it can, and then the poor gets slammed once again.

And the bird-flu pandemic hasn’t even hit yet.