Paper

There's something about the texture and feel of paper that I like. I don't feel the need to read things on paper - I'm fine with the movement of fiction to digital forms - but paper itself, the pulp beneath the ink, is something irreplaceable. My favorites are heavier and grainier varieties; construction paper, comic book paper, the stuff they made paperback novels out of in the 1980s. It has a certain dry feel to it like nothing else and makes a strange and chilling noise when you rub two sheets of it together. In my memory it is forever associated with reading in the back of the classroom in grade school, in stuffing a copy of Jurassic Park in my earth science book in junior high, or in buying copies of Groo before it changed to the higher-quality glossy format.

I also remember my mother taking me to COSI in Columbus and showing me the papermaking exhibit on the Street of Yesteryear, which is another vault of great memory all on its own.

For all my digital knowledge and my daily use of computers and the sheer volume of text I read online each day, I suppose there is a reason I've never read a novel on the Internet before and have no plans to do so.