What is it about electronic readers

Someone gifted me a Kindle. It was never something I would have bought for myself. I'm trying to figure out why I resist reading from it. [Full disclosure: I am still one of those people who gets The New York Times delivered, who rides the subway with a newspaper folded in her hands. Who holds the smooth pages of The New Yorker as she reads.] A year or more ago, I bought and read Sara Bakewell's How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.http://www.sarahbakewell.com/Montaigne.html I was travelling and it seemed like a good way to read the book instead of lugging along a huge hard cover. And I did read it, but I can barely remember the book and the pencil markings, scratchings, I like to make in a physical book are, of course, not there. "Clippings," as Kindle calls them, are a different thing altogether. What brought me to thinking about this, while walking the dog today, is why I'm reading for at least 6 months a really terrific book: Ann Patchett's State of Wonderhttp://www.amazon.com/State-Wonder-Ann-Patchett/dp/0062049801. I'm engrossed in reading it when I pick it up, but then put it down for months. For some reason, because I bought it for my Kindle (pace Ann, who is the only major writer I know of who also owns a bookstore), I don't feel compelled to enter and remain in the world as well. And a different world it is, set mostly in the Amazon jungle with characters that have enough staying power.

I also downloaded the "sample" of my own last book, Burn and Dodgehttp://www.amazon.com/Burn-Dodge-Pitt-Poetry-Series/dp/0822960052, just to see what that would look like. All you get is the first 6 lines of the first poem, which is, aptly, "Regret."

REGRET

        Here's another sin you're sunk within
    owl-necked looking back
to where you might have been
        or what you could have done
   to deep you from the muck
you're stuck standing in.

Okay. Okay. I liked seeing my words on a screen, despite the fact that I had to change the font size so the lineation of the poem wouldn't change. But what I really want is for readers to hold the volume in their hands. And what I want as a reader is to feel the heft of paper, to smell the smell of new paper, to throw a pencil in to mark my place and to use to pencil in whatever notes I care to make. That said, I do intend to finish reading the book on my Kindle. And when I travel this summer, I probably imagine myself bringing the Kindle along, or else borrowing my son's ipad.