I was quite surprised a few months ago when a friend asked what I was reading and I couldn't answer. I knew what I needed to do. I needed to find my Kindle and look. So what does that tell me?
Maybe my memory is failing. I am expecting it to fail. I expect that in 100 years from now, I will not remember anything. At all. That means to me that I am on a trajectory from many memories to none. I have spurts, like the character I wrote about in the comic strip Pickles who recalled that name at breakfast one day, the name he had been trying to remember last week. I have records, notes, photographs with dates they were taken, other paths of research that can help me remember. I have a wife, whose memories of events we participated in together rarely duplicate mine. That means her memories supplement and sometimes supplant mine.
I do have more trouble recalling a random name from the past. I can often tell that I have the memory in my brain but I can't get it to surface. At the time. Sometime, later, it will. But, I am also pretty sure that ebooks have changed my reading some. Not too drastically but changed. I have many books in my Kindle. These days I may have to look to see if I do or don't have a given book. The Kindle makes switching between books quick and easy. It makes searching a book quick and easy.
If I were a many-armed Indian goddess, I could hold several books open to a page I want to read. The Kindle makes it more nearly possible. I tap the page I am reading in the right spot and get the home page. That shows three of my most recent books. Another tap and I am looking at my 7 most recent reads. That not only makes switching easy, it makes comparison easy and fast.
It turns out that I am reading several books I have read before, all about the human unconscious mind and its relation to our conscious mind and our lives. Again, the book that keeps coming to mind is "Incognito" by Eagleman but I am also looking at Vedentam's The Hidden Brain, Fine's A Mind of Its Own and Bargh's Before You Know It. One of the things I like about a Kindle is the ease and speed with which I can mark meaningful sentences. Those sentences are put in a single file by Amazon's software. The file can be a handy personal summary of a book. It looks like this one, from David Weinberger's "Too Big to Know":
https://sites.google.com/site/kirbyvariety/too-big-to-know-highlights
