I flew to a conference last spring with four hardcovers in my carry on because I genuinely couldn’t decide which one I’d be in the mood for, and I want to be upfront that this is not a rational way to pack a bag. My shoulder knew it by the time I got through security. Odette has told me, more than once and not unkindly, that an e-reader weighs about as much as one paperback and holds a thousand books, and every single word of that is true, and I still won’t buy one, and I’ve had to actually sit with why, because “I just don’t want to” stopped being a satisfying answer to myself a while ago.

Part of it is genuinely the job talking. I spend my working hours thinking about what a physical book’s body tells you that the words alone don’t, the wear pattern, the marginalia, the way a spine remembers how it’s been opened. An ebook has none of that history, it can’t, it’s the same file rendered identically every time, no fingerprints on it in either sense. I know that’s not a real argument against reading a novel on a screen during a two hour flight delay. It’s more of a feeling that’s hardened into a policy over five years of handling the alternative for a living.

The bigger, more honest reason is that I don’t finish books the same way on a screen. I’ve tried, borrowed a friend’s tablet for a trip once, made it about sixty pages into something I know I’d have loved in print, and just quietly stopped. I don’t think it’s the technology’s fault exactly, plenty of people read constantly on ereaders and love them and finish more books a year than I do. Something about the physical progress bar of a paperback getting thinner on the right side and thicker on the left is doing real work for my attention that a percentage counter at the bottom of a screen just doesn’t replicate for me. Call it superstition. I’ve stopped fighting it.

So I keep packing too many books and my shoulder keeps complaining and I keep not caring enough to fix it. Odette’s ereader lives in her bag, charges once every couple weeks, weighs nothing, and she finishes twice as many books a year as I do, and none of that has moved me an inch. Some inefficiencies you just decide to live inside rather than solve, and this is apparently one of mine.