Reading

In order to reread The Canterbury Tales, I started to use Kindle, one of the electronic readers available in the market. It has been a very pleasant reading experience especially when I was traveling between places. For people like me who had considered herself as a devoted follower of the cult of real books, it was certainly a surprise. Reading on iPad, iPhone, or mobile phones has been a trend around me for some time, and my first attempt was a recommendable one. For a moment, I wondered if my faith in real books had fallen apart.

Yet, there are still places where electronic devices are banned, for instance, foreign embassies. (Well, I have to admit that it is not the kind of place where one would frequent.) For security reasons, the embassy that I visited last month disallowed any electronic gadgets; therefore, my paperback Chaucer regained its presence. When the book was opened, immediately I felt nostalgic for the smell and the texture of real papers and the crispy sound when pages were turned. This book that I carried was a fourth of a fat volume of Chaucer's works dismembered for the convenience of reading. Lacking a proper back cover, it felt rather soft and fragile between my palms when the sweat and grease of my fingers damped the pages.

It needed a cover, I decided.

Then, as a amateurish tailor, I spent 3 days cutting and sewing a cover for my Chaucer. The tailoring process also involved necessary mending work when my ill-trained hands misguided the scissors to a wrong direction. This manual labor had resulted in stiff shoulders, sore eyes, and some delays in other work. The task was overall enjoyable, albeit I also felt sorry for the time that might have been more effectively used (who knows?!). The threads that are snaking all around the end product are embarrassing. The embarrassment, however, does not prevent me from adoring the floral pattern of berries(?) or flowers (?) in the frame of cold and conservative black color. It would be a romanticized metaphor for reading itself, I think: inside the dull, conventional, squarish format of a book there are many exciting ideas and amazing stories blooming as the reader goes along.