What an E-Reader Can't Download

My wife recently gave me an electronic reader, and I look forward to using it to sample the latest novels, nonfiction and poetry. At the click of a button, as if rubbing a genie from a bottle, I'll be able to summon thousands of books to the screen on my lap.

The books on our living room shelf, on the other hand, were acquired through hours of browsing in bookstores. Lined up at attention from floor to ceiling, they stand as touchstones of my personal geography—bright reminders of places I've been, things I've seen, and people I've met.

While sipping coffee this morning, for example, I glanced at the spine of Lance Morrow's "Fishing in the Tiber" and thought instantly of Cleveland, even though the city doesn't figure at all in Morrow's lively collection of magazine essays. I'd gone to Ohio in December of 1991 to see my friend Stuart and his wife Anula, and they drove me into Cleveland for dinner at an Italian restaurant. Before eating, we braved a bitter gust from Lake Erie to visit a nearby bookstore, where Morrow's book landed in my hand.

To see the book these many years later is to think of red wine and pasta, wind and winter, good friends and good writing.

I like the verse of the late British poet Philip Larkin, and I'd heard he was also a great jazz critic, but I didn't discover this firsthand until I came across a copy of his prose collection, "Required Writing," at a Paris bookstore many years ago. Each time I dust the bookcase, I return again to the City of Light.

I can go on like this for hours. There's the cunning little collection of Stéphane Mallarmé poems I found in Greenwich Village on my first night in New York. On the shelf above it is the anthology of E.B. White essays I bought in New Orleans to kill the time after a movie screening was canceled. And thanks to a fat assortment of her stories I acquired in Charleston, Flannery O'Connor will always be paired in my mind with the city where my wife and I honeymooned.

Electronic books can give us a universe of reading without ever leaving the house. But the books on my shelf help me remember that reading isn't merely an inhalation of data. My library, and the years and places it evokes, speak of something deeper: the interplay of literature and the landscape of a life, the vivid record of a slow and winding search for wisdom, truth, the spark of pleasure or insight.

I'll welcome my e-reader and the benefits it promises. But maybe you can forgive me for wondering if we haven't also lost something in the bargain.

(Originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal)