a pretentious (and worthless) nook review

one of the few outgoing pecuniary transactions that manages to give me pleasure these days is one of a subscription to the nytimes on what has become the fascinating little ereading devise. while a feeble attempt at sticking to the paper and ink was superficially intact, there was a little rat that continued gnawing at my internal wiring, the last bite being that of an email from my mother sending me a link that advertised the nook for free with a purchase of the new york times. rather than my typical consumer-driving, knee-jerk reaction that brought me to previous, and often disheartening pecuniary results, i did not react immediately upon her email, but rather began a slow search to decide if the purchase was going to be made. initially, the offerings that the nook had seemed limited, the closest competition offered all of the news papers that i  have wanted to receive to my doorstep for the past 9 years, and this offered only a few, one of which has had my interest for the past 11 years (since my only tangential foray into the world of international relations through a class by a phenomenal professor and the book the peloponnesian war by thucydides). with the murder of motivation at its peak for the nook, i hurried to my usual monday night engagement and let the cold air ice the trails of intrigue that wound through the misfiring neurons. i began to vacillate between the prospect of the juggernaut of the ereaders and the one that offered my an easy point of entry.

the online digital nytimes (non-subscription) limits its readers (on each device, I might add) to 20 articles per month. in one of my last remaining articles i read the following: external link to the NYT. the decision as to which device, if any, was entwined in the lifeblood messaging of the article.

i still only have one paper delivered to my house -electronically- each morning, but there are also, much to my initial dismay, a couple ebooks whose letters, words, paragraphs and pages all hide themselves in code until the finger-tap is completed on the touchscreen. i will forever want to hold the pages of a book in my hand so that i can feel the history of the work in my hands, the tangible evidence of the process to existence, the smell of the historical trail of the contents and those fingers that previously molested the pages, waking them from the dormant period that precluded the momentary attention, that ended in a seeming ignorance of the contents with a re-gifted shadow of the next temporary focus. the existence in digital form seems even more ephemeral than the tactile paper-ink combination, but somehow it has manage to engage me just the same. it will never replace the desired bookshelves in my final place of non-celestial (given my aversion to an expected continuance) residence, but it has a place, a function, and even a facility that cannot be granted to the otherwise stimulating printed material. especially those publications that take the periodical form.