What pushed me back
It wasn't romanticism. The first paper book I bought again was a used copy of John McPhee's Coming into the Country, $4 from a shop in Portland with a cat asleep on the cookbooks. I read it in three sittings and remembered things from it for weeks. That hadn't happened to me with an ebook in a long time.
I think the screen made every book feel the same size. Paper gives a book a shape — the thickness of the right-hand pages tells you, without thinking about it, how much of the story is still ahead. I missed that signal.
What I didn't expect
- I read more slowly on paper, and I don't mind anymore.
- I dog-ear pages without guilt. The book is mine.
- I've started keeping a small index card in each book — three lines of notes when I finish.
What I'm not giving up
The Kindle still travels with me. Long flights, hotel rooms, the kind of trip where one extra hardcover is one too many. But at home, when I have a choice, I reach for the shelf first now. That's the whole change. It isn't a manifesto. It's just a quiet preference, finally allowed back in.