Bring it on: musings of a slow adopter

I am what the savvy might term a slow adopter. I tend to like things as they are.  My movies on the big screen.  My books between their covers.  My conversations in person, face to face.

That is not this world.

And if I am less than knowledgeable about Facebook (I am, perhaps, one of its least organized and aware members), have failed to take on Twitter, am not inclined toward Google +, only just yesterday did justice to my LinkedIn profile (how shabby my former presence was), and make more mistakes in typing Blackberry texts than any living writer, I am coming around to the way the world works.

I have an iPad 2 and I use it to read the New York Times (except the Times magazine, which I still prefer to hold), to catch up with the Inquirer, to read the occasional Kindle or iBook.  (The New Yorker and Food and Wine and Vanity Fair still come, old style, to my house.)  My email friends are legion.  I'm an old-time blogger (holding my ground here, refusing to vanish).  And lately I've been thinking about (not dreading, but embracing) the new ways in which the publishing industry works.  Why not an Amazon single, for example, if the audience is already primed for it?  And why not a book with multi-media illustrations—something web friendly, something e-alive?

It's the middle of August.  The days have been long.  I prefer autumn to summer.  I look toward the new season with hope for my October 25 release, You Are My Only, with eagerness to connect with some of you at a variety of talks, and with the high suspicion that I'm about to change the way I go about making of (some) books.  

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Girls in Wash of Blue (and what I'm reading)

Glasses up. Glasses on. No glasses.

Don't ask me why (my own brain processes often elude even me, the owner of this most porous brain), but this photograph symbolizes my changing relationship to books as I try to decide what to read in hardback, paperback, and iPad2-ery.

Just now, I've ordered the following from the Kindle Store:

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories (Margaret Drabble)
Desperate Characters (Paula Fox)
The Coffins of Little Hope (Timothy Schaffert)
Faith (Jennifer Haigh)
The Paris Wife (Paula McLain)

These join the following to-be-read Kindle titles (I read both before, as real books):

Selected Stories (Andre Dubus)
Sophie's Choice (William Styron)

Now, from the iBook store:

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Robin Black

They all join Tara Altebrando's Dreamland Social Club—a real book, a hardcover, as my next reads.

I'll be reporting back, of course.

In the meantime, might I note how glad I have been to be hearing from my students during these summer days. Might I say, too, that I am grateful that there is a new generation of smart young souls who know how to use language—know where sentences begin and end, know, unprompted, how to eliminate their own redundancies, lean into the music. How you are needed. How valued you are. How you might save the world.

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