being frank

I have been unfaithful.


To my Kindle.


You have heard me wax eloquent -- at least, at length --about my electronic reader since I bought it.  How I find reading on it far more convenient than a hardbound book.  How I can get my old hometown newspaper delivered each morning no matter where I am in the world.  How I can carry a full library with me on a trip and never have to worry about heft.


It was not always thus.  I brought down a stack of books when I moved to Mexico two years ago.


When I arrived, I started tearing through them.  Realizing I could not find a bookstore anywhere near this beach, I started rationing them.


Then came the Kindle.  And the remnant sat on my reading table gathering dust while I lavished all of my attention and praise on my new-found love from Amazon.


For some reason earlier this month, I looked at the stack.  Probably in the same way that mothers in nursing homes leaf through the birthday cards they once received from their children.


I picked up the largest of the lot -- laughing to myself that I once had to deal with the logistics of books that size.


Then I made the mistake of opening it up.  Reading one page after the other.  Getting a tactile joy out of feeling the texture of high quality paper on my fingertips.


The next thing I knew, I was three chapters deep in H.W. Brands’s Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  I was a little bit surprised at myself when I bought the biography.  Roosevelt is not a natural topic for a fellow with a libertarian bent.


But I had enjoyed Brands’s interesting and even-handed approach in Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times.  Anyone who can handle the prickly topic of Jackson without causing eyes to roll, while opening those eyes to a new perspective, is a biographer worth reading.


The book is nearly a 1000 pages long.  I am about half way though it.  And half way is not enough to pass judgment.  But it is interesting enough that I want to finish it before I leave for San Miguel.


If I can’t finish it before I leave, I will take FDR with me.  From what I hear, he would fit right in to that colonial town in the highlands.