I fell in love with soccer while living overseas, and seeing weekly matches in the English FA Cup league, and some Italian and Spanish league games. So today I simply say congratulations to the USA team, winning over Algeria and advancing to the next round of the World Cup tournament. Well done.

With two goals disallowed under questionable circumstances, the USA actually scored 6 goals and gave up 3, and should have had two wins and 7 points. A very good performance.

Good luck in the round of 16.

We are in Chicago, having been here since Thursday night, staying with our son and his roommate. This was after having been in Oklahoma City for a day, attending the ordination of our son-in-law Richard.

The timing of this trip was to attend the Chicago Tribune Publishers Row Lit Fair, set up downtown on a couple of streets. We went to that on Saturday. It was a great mass of humanity, going between about 100 booths. It looked to me like people were buying. I passed up one used book on the way in, due to budgetary constraints, thought better of it and decided to buy it on the way out. It was gone. Someone else paid the $8.50 for it, I guess. The crowds thinned a little during several episodes of light rain, but still it was crowded.

On Friday we went to the Museum of Science and Industry in the Hyde Park neighborhood. It was a free day, so it was crammed with people. I got in free; Lynda and Charles paid extra to see the Harry Potter exhibit. I wasn’t interested in that, so I spent that time in the U-505 exhibit, which they saw on a previous visit. That was really something, a German U-boat captured intact June 4, 1944, towed to Bermuda thence to the East Coast and eventually to Chicago. It was moved indoors, quite an engineering feat, in 2003.

Today we went to the Hyde Park Art Fair. Six-hundred-eighty exhibitors from coast to coast were here, having attracted a sea of humanity. The artwork was lovely, but the prices so high we didn’t do any serious looking. Lunch cost $23, quite high by my standards, but they have a captive audience. As we walked back to Charles’ car, we went by the Rockefeller Chapel (misnamed, since it holds 1,500 people and thus is not a chapel by my definitions), popped in, and observed a handful of people in it attending a lecture/presentation about Albert Schweitzer, a weekend event commemorating the 60th anniversary of his visit to the University of Chicago. Next door, at the president’s house, was a shindig for some key alumni. Charles thought it might be an alumni weekend.

From where does all this energy come? And all this money? To look at Chicago you would never know we are in a depression, or even a recession. I suppose some of the book and art vendors could compare this year’s sales to last year’s and determine how they did and advise if we are in a recession or not.

The people, the sales, the activity. I have lived in the ex-urbs for so long I’ve forgotten how busy the big city can be.

I saw them for the first time yesterday: the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader. These two devices are the latest technology for displaying and reading electronic books. Sony was first on the market with a display that gives the reader the sensation of reading ink on paper even though it is pixels on screen. Amazon came next, and all the reports I’ve seen are that Kindle is better than Reader. I imagine both of them have old versions and new versions and that, as everything goes in technology, they are leap-frogging each other in quality of the product and reduction in price.

I saw the Kindle first on a flight from Phoenix to DFW. I had to make an urgent trip to the bathroom (well, I guess you all didn’t need to know that), but found it occupied and had to wait about a minute. The woman sitting in the aisle seat on the last row was reading a book on a Kindle, and so I had a few, impatient moments to talk to her about it. She loves it.

I saw the Reader also yesterday on the connecting flight from DFW to NW Arkansas. The man sitting across the aisle from me on the one hour flight had one, and I got to look at it for a while as he demonstrated its features and answered my questions. He loves it.

Both of these devices were a little smaller than I expected, maybe a little less than 5×7 inches, and very slim, very slim. Both have a flip-over cover to protect the screen. Both seemed to show a realistic display of black ink on white paper. The text size is changeable. Neither is back-lit (at least I’m sure the Reader isn’t; didn’t ask about the Kindle), so you must have light to read it. Nothing wrong with that.

I did not ask to hold either. Nor did I ask about battery capacity, or storage capacity–though I understand both of them have the capacity to download and hold more than 100 books at 500 pages per book. That’s a lot less to lug through airports than the equivalent paper. Yet, I won’t be rushing out to buy one of these gadgets. The feel of the book in the hand is something I’m not ready to give up, nor the smell of the paper, nor the physical bookmark that I lovingly come back to day after day. I like to slip my finger beneath the right page as soon as I begin turning the left page, even though I’ve got two full pages to go before I need to flip. On a non-fiction book, I often like to keep the book open at the page I’m reading, but have a thumb or finger in another place, and flip back there frequently to cross-check information. When I start a new chapter, I like to first look ahead to see how many pages are in it, maybe even stick a finger there, making a claim on those pages as I start reading that chapter.

No doubt these all have an equivalent in the Kindle and Reader. But I’m still not getting one. Possibly I’ll be the last hold-out among everyone I know. I’m about the last person without a portable MP3 player, so you know I’m not an embracer of technology.

On Tuesday, while waiting for the flight from DFW to Phoenix to board, I saw a man with a paperback version of Team of Rivals, the fairly recent history of President Lincoln and the team he chose for his cabinet sitting on top of his carry-on bag. I have it in my reading stack, picked off the remainders table at Barnes & Noble. I have two or three much smaller books in front of it, one of which I started yesterday on the flight. But, seeing the book, I struck up a conversation with the man and discussed it with him. For about three minutes, standing in line in the terminal and on the jet way, we talked about Lincoln and the specific books and history books and history. We parted inside the plane and I didn’t talk with him again.

But suppose he had been reading this on a Kindle or Reader? Would I have taken the audacious step of saying, “Oh, you have a Kindle. What are you reading on it?” No, I likely would not. But having seen the book on his luggage and being able to recognize the title, it was easy to say, “Oh, I’ve been waiting to get to my copy of that. How do you find it?” So it seems to me that the Kindle and Reader, for all of their benefits, will contribute to the growing digital isolation. And I can’t see that as a good thing.