Paper books are just better until they aren't
Posted: 2025-09-30
Paper books are better. This sentiment is probably shared among a lot of people, but since it's my blog I'm talking about my personal experiences with paper, e-books, and reading in general here.
I love reading. Mostly because I didn't have friends, but well.
My mom made me read a lot of stuff. Before I could talk she was reciting the Three Character Classic to me; they still have a video of that on an old external hard drive. We had all the Berenstain Bears books (in Chinese) and my dad would read it aloud to me and my brother every night. Despite huge cultural differences, they were actually quite relatable to us because there's a big brother and a little sister. Whenever we went outside, she would point at literally anything with words written on it and read it aloud to me; to this day I still have the habit of reading literally any sign I come across.
I could already read most kids' stuff when other kids were still agonizing over learning pīnyīn. In fact, I learned pīnyīn after I learned to read characters. I still remember that in second grade, we were still using the old, small version of the Chinese textbook, and we were reading this story about a little gecko who lost its tail. The teacher asked us if we noticed anything different about this story than all the previous content of the book. I was legit confused and didn't know what was different, but multiple kids immediately raised their hands saying that it was the first passage written without pīnyīn above the characters. Only then did I really notice that indeed, the pīnyīn was gone and the typography was a lot more tidy as a result.
And then we went to the US where there was a library really close to us. I'd spend hours just there, reading through Rainbow Magic, A-Z Mysteries, Warrior Cats, and possibly a bunch of other books I forgot about. (Really sad that I didn't know about Captain Underpants right then.)
In short, reading is great. I love it.
The last physical book I purchased was House of Leaves, which cost me a great 300 yuan and I never opened it, LMAO. Before that I bought the Wings of Fire series. The books were great, but not that worth buying, since they're pretty short and don't feature that many elements that would be better on an actual page, like pictures or unique formatting. Before then I also got the first like 7 books of Spy School, which I gave away to one of my mom's colleague's son after finishing. Now that I think about it I should really see if I can get my mom to tell the kid to stop reading those books, but it was a while ago… Also I kept buying Dog Man and Cat Kid comics because you're just supposed to read comics in paperback.
Somewhere in middle school my dad got me a Kindle. I started to read e-books then, because they are indeed way more convenient. But here's the shame of my entire life that I could never erase: I didn't know how to pirate back then. I bought most of these e-books. Some newer Warrior Cats, random one-offs, and heavens forbid the entire Captain Underpants series — I mean, those picture / comic books are way better off when read in paperback, not to mention the Flip-O-Ramas. I want to slap old-me in the face for this. And also it's Amazon so all my purchases were made in fucking USD with my dad's ancient credit card.
I read most John le Carré books, and all of the spy novels now that I think of it, with pirated EPUBs that I email to the kindle. Because there are simply so many of them. I would definitely go broke if I actually bought them. There is also no way I can fit all of them at home, especially since we started moving between the commie-block and Grandma's all the time — I could only read my physical book collection when we were in Grandma's, but I can read my e-books anywhere, as long as I have my kindle.
I didn't bring my kindle to the US because it's getting old with an annoyingly short battery life and it charges with that old asymmetric Android plug. Even before then, during the summer, I was reading more with my phone. Which made my reading progress significantly slower as I keep getting distracted and switching to other apps; and it's a lot harder on my eyes. I spent way too long on The Little Drummer Girl and had been stalling on A Perfect Spy for two months because of this. Not good.
Which is why, today, I decided to check out my school's library to see if they had it.
I hadn't been in a proper library since my last time in the US. I've only went to my high school's library for the purpose of studying wasting time on my computer; and in addition we didn't have many English books and they were all messily organized. Something interesting. The most-borrowed book there was 1984, which tells you everything you need to know about this godforsaken high school. And also the second most-borrowed was The Moon and Sixpence which was obviously required reading in class for the college-entrance track kids.
So today I got this huge-ass copy of A Perfect Spy that was old as fuck and just the way I think books should be. Old, yellowed, fuzzy at the edges.
What I like about paper books is just. They're paper books. There's no better feeling than the feeling of a solid book in your hands whose pages you can flip through; especially if the paper is old and yellow and gives off that book-smell. But I also like e-books in that I can pirate them forever, and I can carry an entire library inside my phone. But e-books are used out of necessity. If I can conveniently get a paper book, I'd go for it.