The best and the worst thing that has happened to me recently has been owning a Kindle.
I was heavily resistant to the idea at first.
I love to read and I love books.
I love the feel of books, the smell of them, the way the paper feels between my fingers, and the fact that I can drag some of my favorite books off of my bookshelf and have a little piece of my own history lying in my hands.
Like the self-help book I read all the way through Southeast Asia that has pages still stained with the sauce of ground chili peppers that nearly blew my head off in Thailand or the mud of Angkor Wat where the book fell out of my pack while hiking in the ruins.
Or the series of romance novels I read throughout travels to Italy whose pages are stained with olive oil from drippings from the bread I ate, greasy pizza bianca fingerprints, and a splash of Chianti over the entire binding for good measure.
Then there are the cheap beach novels that smell like the sand in Florida or New Jersey; the Shakespeare collection that is wind-whipped from explorations in northern England, and the travel memoirs of Africa that have been loaned so many times while living in Uganda that they come back smelling like the perfumes of multiple kitchens and people.
Then there was also my favorite thing in the world to consider in giving up "real" books...the bathtub experience.
I love nothing more than a super-hot bath after a long day perfumed with bath crystals smelling like my favorite flowers or herbs. Add to that a book I am currently enamored with, a big glass of red wine, and some soft background music and I am in my own heaven for at least two hours.
However, like many humans, I am a monster in consumption if left unchecked.
I buy books like I buy food and shoes...whatever tickles my fancy at the given moment with no respect to practicality or long-term suitability whatsoever. I also subscribe to magazines (mostly of the cooking variety) in the same way.
My boyfriend, Chas, accommodated this about me for the first year or so we were living together.
He built super-sturdy bookshelves in our second bedroom which doubles as an office.
He made me binders and folders to store the recipes that should have been cut from magazines.
Finally, he allocated a space in his shed (read: Outdoor Man Cave) for my books.
Overall, he was very tolerant of my habit.
Until the wall-mounted bookshelf guaranteed to hold about 300lbs of weight came crashing down last February, smashing onto the dresser and sending my jewelry flying everywhere and putting a sizable dent in the wicker before bouncing into a table full of his artwork and accounting supplies and sending them flying.
That's when we knew things had to change.
"I'm buying you a Kindle," Chas told me, trying to secure the bookshelf onto the wall again.
"Nooooo!" I wailed. " I cannot use a Kindle! I like the feel of books too much, the whole sensory experience that goes along with them, being able to take them into the bathtub..."
"Well, I enjoy the whole sensory experience of being certain that things don't fall off the walls and crash into furniture, artwork, and my accounting materials unexpectedly. As for the bathtub...why don't you read one of your hundreds of cooking magazines in there? It's not like they will get too damaged from being dunked once or twice..." he motioned to my stack of cooking magazines that were about to go up onto the shelf that had crashed to the floor.
I resisted fiercely for a couple of weeks until he dragged me to the store to pick out a Kindle.
I pouted the entire way.
"I don't care which one you want to buy me. Just get me the cheap one, I'll never use the damn thing anyway!! You, you...you have broken my soul!" I hissed at him as the pimply teenager rang us out and Chas ignored me and my dramatic outburst.
And, true to my word, I didn't touch the damn thing. For about a week.
Then, curiosity getting the better of me, I decided to try it out.
The first thing I noted was that books were a hell of a lot less expensive in this format. Game, I downloaded a few and, after a couple of days, realized that I wasn't suffering as badly as expected holding a little electronic device to read from.
Then one day, downloading a book from Amazon, I noticed that I had the option of partaking in some free ones. I selected one at random, thinking, "Bound to be a crappy read but, hey, it's free!" and all but ignoring the title.
And that's where my current fascination with smut started.
I had no idea of the world of adult erotica, and all of its various incarnations, until I got a Kindle.
Mind you, I am in no way, shape or form adverse to adult or pornographic literature. I am no prude and as long as what I am reading does not violate my Cardinal Four No-Go Rules (No kids, no animals, no forced or violence-motivated sex, and no excrement), I am pretty much a "live and let live" type of person when it comes to that. Hell, those who know me well might recall that I did indeed supplement my income in college by writing pornography under a pseudonym for a certain well-known women's erotic magazine.
But I never purchased adult erotica in traditional "book form." I never read the Harlequin romance books when I was a kid and basically never gave the genre a second thought unless a friend (I have two who are very successful pornography writers, one for men/men and one for men/women, one a rocket scientist and the other a psychologist) asked me to review their drafts. So I don't really know why I didn't ever seek it out on my own, but I didn't.
Until the Kindle.
A Kindle makes it so easy to read anonymously because there are no book covers. And the genre of adult erotica, particularly written by women for women, has improved so much since I was "in the field," so I was completely drawn in.
I became addicted to certain authors and their various series. I looked forward to each new book. And no, women who write erotica for women do not generally do it the same way men do. It is more subtle, more romantic, more completely attuned to a woman's mind.
I was smitten.
Thinking that this was one thing I could indulge in without an audience, I told no one of my new devotion.
Until Chas caught me on a plane ride down to Florida in December.
Looking over at me, he happened to glance down upon the page I was currently reading.
He gasped.
"What are you reading?!" he asked, his face the picture of surprise.
Chas has never gotten involved in what I am reading and has been basically passive in the face of my wild and varied subject matters. The fact that my bookshelf contains books stretching a broad span of historical, mystery, self-help, physics, animal husbandry, cooking, and political theory has never fazed him. The only time he ever asked about my choice in literature was when I was reading the "Conversations with God" series and he got nervous I was going to become a Jehovah's Witness and insist he do the same based on a past trauma with an ex.
(Note: Conversations with God has absolutely nothing with Jehovah's Witnesses at all. It's actually a very enlightening read.)
Flummoxed, I slammed the Kindle book cover shut and tried to ignore him.
"It's nothing," I said.
"Nothing? I just saw the words 'cock' and 'mate' in one paragraph, Patti."
Then he said, "Unless you've developed a particular fascination with rooster breeding in the United Kingdom or the British territories where that word means something a hell of lot different than it means here, then I can only guess you're reading porn," he surmised.
"OK, well I am just researching it, just looking into different things I am unfamiliar with..." I stuttered.
"Patti, you are 36 years old and fairly worldly, how many different things on those topics are you THAT unfamiliar with?" he pressed on.
Naturally and because, FOR ONCE, he wouldn't let it go, our friend Kelly, sitting next to me, looked over.
"You reading porn?" she asked.
"No!" I stumbled. "I am reading...adult erotica."
Kelly smiled. "So, porn, basically. Is it good?"
I glared at Chas.
He smiled and held his hands up.
"Read whatever you want, Babe, it can only help my case in the short term..." he said.
I didn't speak to him for the rest of the flight and focused instead on the airline magazine full of dull stories.
When we got to my mother's house, she noticed the tension immediately.
"Oh no, what's wrong? You two aren't fighting are you?" she queried.
"Nah, she's just upset because I caught her reading porn on her Kindle while we were on the plane," Chas reported.
My mother looked confused.
"I have no idea what you're talking about, exactly. But, really, Patti, reading porn on the airplane? Can't you at least get ahold of yourself until you're on firm ground?" she asked.
I sighed, getting ready to explain when my mother's long-term partner walked into the room.
"What's this I hear?" he said. "Patti, did I just hear Chas say that you're reading porn on your Twittle while on the plane?"
"KINDLE!!!" both Chas and I said at the same time.
Later that night, on my side in the guest bedroom and refusing to even take his hand across the mountain of sheets and blankets I had piled high between us, I heard Chas chuckle.
"You know I don't care what you read and I certainly didn't mean to embarrass you. You just were such a pain in the ass about the whole thing on giving up physical books so I had to tease you a little bit. In any case, I never meant to upset you," he whispered.
I ignored him.
"Patti? Please, Love, I am happy you enjoy your new Twittle. Really, I am." he said, suppressing a laugh.
I giggled myself and knocked down part of the mountain, looking for his hand.
"Now," he said, "tell me all about the sexual habits of roosters in the former Empire..."
I love my Kindle. And my Twittle. And smut.
So be it.
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