I was going to buy a Kindle.....

I was going to buy myself an e-reader, a Kindle, for Christmas.  Every newspaper I came across in the months leading up to the holiday period seemed to be publishing articles about the different e-readers and from what I could see, Kindle was the best for me. The portability of all these devices appealed to me, and besides I was greatly tempted by the large amount of out-of-copyright books available on Project Gutenburg. Then, however, I started to blog about my book mountain, and I thought again.

The first reason is associated with a small amount of technophobia, I suppose you could say:  I don't like the idea of my reading being vulnerable to hackers or errors which might wipe out my book store.  Yes, I know it's unlikely, although just a week ago or so I read something about e-readers being hacked, though I can't recall where....still, the possibililty is not something happy, to my mind.  And the idea that my books would be backed up in some safe cyber place, well, that doesn't appeal either.  I want to be able to see them, for myself, at any time I need to, and what's more, I want to see them all together.  In other words, I want to own them as items, real living artefacts, with covers and pages and often illustrations.  Because you see, no electricity, no battery, they're not mine any more.  They're nothing.

But it's not just that.  There is one particular case where e-books cannot answer. You can't stumble on a treasure...when you go bookhunting online you already know at least to some degree what you are looking for, you have heard of it somewhere, through reviews or word of mouth or otherwise,  or you have found a list of books in a search, but you knew roughly what you were searching for.. Yet another minus is that, although you can look inside books that are for sale on Amazon and other sites, you can't look through the whole book, you have to take the pages chosen for you, for obvious reasons.

For me the bottom line is, with e-readers you cannot experience the joy of your eye being caught by a book, then feeling the pages, and particularly if the book is new, smelling the lovely tang of the paper. You don't get the excitement of opening the covers and seeing for the first time an unexpected world - with e-books the whole sensory experience of book acquisition is absent.. With a real book, however, you bring it home from your bookshop, or book sale or recycling centre with a feeling in your heart that no e-book on any e-reader can match.  You can put it on a table or chair near you, and look at it and gloat.  you can put your favourite bookmark in it, between its pages you can press a flower....No, for me, in comparison an e-book just can't hack it.

My first two books tonight are cookery books, one from a library sale and one from the recycling centre.  "Poor Cook" by Susan Campbell and Caroline Conran, published by First Sphere Books in my copy, dated 1972, was a library find. It gives recipes which are really topical now because of the recession.  The authors say in their introduction that eating cheaply means buying good cheap ingredients as opposed to inferior expensive ones - a bit obvious, I suppose, given the title of the book.  I tend to think that any home baking or cookery will always be cheaper than buying readymade dishes, or even more, than eating out, and I am sure I'm right.  The special thing about this book is its recipe for potato crisps, which form part of the subsidiary diet of so many households and which at around 70 or 80 cents for a single bag full of as much salt as crisps, definitely are not cheap. If you then count all the additives in them, you are certainly getting more than you bargained for.  When I first encountered potato crisps in England as a small child, they came in a greaseproof bag with salt in a little twist of paper sitting just inside the top when you opened it.  You salted it as you liked and there wasn't enough to overdo it.  Likewise in Spain, patatas fritas were sold similarly wrapped on the beach by cheerful salespeople, and the salt was separate in them too.  So the answer to all that salt and the additives and e-numbers is diy crisps.  The fat might kill you but you won't die of poisoning.

In "Harrods Book of Chocolates & Other Edible Gifts", published by Ebury Press London, 1986. and edited by Fiona MacIntyre and Barbara Croxford,  I found what seems to be an easy recipe for homemade butterscotch:






The next book from the recycling centre has no cover and the front papers are missing, but luckily there is a back cover, so I know the title is "Create Pendulum Magic and Miracles", by Richard Webster, and the publishers are Llewellyn Worldwide, St. Paul, Minnesota.  Unfortunately, no date because of the missing bits.  I'm not one of those new-age people, and if I were thinking of miracles, which I'm quite willing to believe in, I don't think I would be thinking of pendulums, but I can say one thing, I gave one to a son once as a present and he was able to forecast the winner of the European Cup (Greece -  2004)  before any of the finals had been played.

The contents list gives intriguing chapter names such as "How to find Lost Objects", "Self-Improvement with the Pendulum", "Real Magic with the Pendulum" and even "Advanced Magic with the Pendulum".  Sounds a little like a Hogwarths textbook... On page 57 I read, under the heading of Map Dowsing, "Fortunately, practicing map dowsing is an enjoyable exercise.  Obtain a map of the area you live in.  Start from your home and allow the pendulum to lead you to the home of a friend."   ???  Wouldn't that be cheating?  After all, you do, I suppose, know where you're going.  One experiment that can do no harm that I can see is to ask the pendulum where a friend is, then call him on his mobile (called cell phone in the book) to find out how accurate you were. That sounds fun.  If it works, even more fun,  though perhaps a bit superfluous in these days of said mobile phones.  I would skip the chapter entitled "The Pendulum and Your Health".  I just know I would find I had some serious disease if I used it for that.  Of course, if you are made of sterner stuff than I, go for it.

I love plants, of all kinds, and because I can have them to live with me indoors, I particularly love house plants.  "Fun with Growing Odd and Curious House Plants" by Virginie F. and George A. Elbert, was published by Crown Publishers, Inc., New York in 1975.  House plants were very much in vogue at that time, because of the rush back to people's roots and the earth,  led by the hippie movement.  I am familiar with many of the plants in the book because of the house plant forum on the Garden Web, but there is one extraordinary one I have not yet succeeded in finding since I read about it in this book. Here it is called Fire Fern, but it is not a fern, but Oxalis hedysaroides rubra, and if you know anything about oxalis plants in general, you know that they fold up their leaves at night.  Some even do it when disturbed, like Mimosa pudica, the Sensitive Plant, which shys away when touched and folds its leaves up so that its branches seem withered.  But apparently, this oxalis does more:

".........if you watch the plant on some days, especially when it is feeling frisky, which is usually during hot spells, you will see a motion in the individual leaflets.  Watch very closely and suddenly - you will believe that it is an optical illusion - a leaflet will move from the vertical to the horizontal and another, in a different part of the plant, from horizontal to vertical.  The rest of the leaf is not affected.  Soon you will notice that this quick movement is going on all over the plant at irregular intervals - some leaves going up and others down.  It's really something". 

Might be best not to see that when you've had one over the eight...

The authors go on to talk about a day they had to move a largish plant of this type around a lot, and in doing so, had disarranged the branches.

"After it had been placed in its final position it remained perfectly quiet for several minutes.  Then the entire plant suddenly shivered violently and all the branches and leaves changed back to their old positions from which they had been disarranged.  The motion stopped as quickly as it began."

This must be amazing to see.  Many plants of the maranta family move, like the prayer plant which closes its leaves upwards in the evening, not necessarily, I have found, in the dark, and sometimes I am told they can be seen doing it, and slow-motion cameras have been able to show it happening.  Still, to see it happening in real time right in front of your eyes, as with the oxalis, that must be a sight indeed.

There are pages and pages of interesting and intriguing plants in this volume.  Even one will add spice to your life.  A plant when it lives with you and is well looked after, fed, watered, and maybe even at times talked to, can become like a pet.  You may even find yourself buying it a fancy overpot for Christmas. When you get up in the morning you will know whether it is feeling happy or sad, and you will certainly know immediately when it is being attacked.  You may well find the one with which you want to share your home in this book.

Good luck with the hunt, whether for book or plant.