The printed page is the best place for words

Anyone who knows me will recognise the black bag I carry with me anywhere and everywhere (FYI: it’s always a black bag from my favourite comic shop Gosh!, but not always the same bag). The bag contains the novel I am reading at any point, and I am always reading a novel.

In fact, I have a fierce aversion to going on public transport without a book. It isn’t so much that I have a short attention span as that I hate to waste time I could be using to read (I read while brushing my teeth). Anyway, this morning – horror of horrors – I somehow (who knows how) – managed to leave my book at home.

Luckily, in anticipation of just such an eventuality, I have saved several books in electronic form on my iPhone, and so I read a chunk of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson which I thoroughly enjoyed, not having read it since I was nine or ten.

However, I didn’t enjoy reading it half so much as I would have if it had been in paper format. Call me a sad old technophobe, but I love books in printed, paper format. The late, great John Updike said it best here. The printed page is the best place for words.

I don’t need books to be printed forever. Just another 50 years or so.

RIP John Updike

This New Yorker piece on John Updike is golden.

I adored his Rabbit novels and many of his short stories.

And this is one of the most beautiful pieces of sports writing I’ve ever read. “Gods do not answer letters”.