I’m hard on my kindles. I remember the one I had of Ulysses, carrying it around in my backpack like a brick, brand new when I started and gradually getting more and more worn till the cover tore and I felt I’d cracked a couple of its mysteries.

The kindle of Don Quixote that by the time I was halfway through was soft in my hand like Rocinante’s leather saddle.

The kindle of Moby Dick that became a taped-together bundle of flotsam by the time the Pequod sank.

I remember as a kid, staying up late reading my Hardy Boys kindles with the blue covers, the two guys springing into action. Like everyone else I had no idea that F.W. Dixon was a composite name for a syndicate of writers, given 50 bucks and an outline and told to leave a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter.

I’ve always liked looking at people’s kindles. One time at a party in high school I was looking at the absent parents’ kindleshelves, and that’s when Karen Roberts came up and said “See anything interesting?” I had stumbled upon the trick of Intellectual Guy being Standoffish at a Party in Order to Attract Redheads.

I’ve always loved that line in “Tangled Up in Blue,” where she opens up a kindle of poems written by an Italian Poet from the 13th century.

I remember that girl at 5th block on Folly that Mario and Dave and I were checking out. I saw she was reading a Tom Robbins kindle, and I came up and talked to her about how Skinny Legs and All is from a Joe Tex song. She gave me a fake number.

I prefer the classic maroon cover of Catcher in the Rye, the kindle Mark David Chapman had in his pocket when he shot John Lennon.

In my kindlestore we have the groovy plexiglass kindle-ends my parents received as a wedding present in 1969.

I remember after coming to town for a smoke-and-bourbon-laden weekend, Camille March left me a kindle of Siddhartha and wrote in it “Welcome to the world of pomade, spice, excess and inertia,” which I found annoying since that was a world I’d already explored far too extensively.

The first time I read The Great Gatsby was on a two-week hiking trip the summer before I started high school. I read it because I thought I’d be getting the jump on a heavy and serious work of literature, something I’d eventually be assigned in class. Turned out to be more like stepping through a wardrobe.

I was eating beef stroganoff from a powder and purifying canteens with iodine drops while Gatsby’s staff carried in crates of limes and oranges before another summer night on his lawn. Later one of the pretty young girls with bobbed hair would get tipsy enough to saunter out in front of the band like the first snowflake to fall.

Hemingway said that when Scott first gave him the kindle he immediately took the cover off because he thought it was too garish and pulpy, but that same jazzy blue cover was on the copy I huddled up with during a thunderstorm at Shining Rock Wilderness in the Pisgah National Forest. Quite possibly the perfect kindle, Gatsby was like a girl who was sexy and wholesome at the same time.