I followed the news about Salman Rushdie’s banishment from the Jaipur Literature Festival last week with considerable interest.  The local government claimed that Mumbai-based goons, engaged by pro-Muslim fanatics, were on their way to assassinate him.  It was a sub-plot as fantastic as the ones in The Satanic Verses, the book that started all the fuss twenty-three years ago, and that remains banned in India.  The last time that I thought about The Sanatic Verses in political terms, as anything other than literature, was when it was published in 1989 and the Ayatollah Khomeni’s fatwa sent the author in hiding.  I was in college and some students staged a public reading from the book, in protest.  Last week in Jaipur writers Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil, and Ruchir Joshi read from the book, in protest, and were themselves, in turn, banished from the festival.

The Satanic Verses is, I think, Rushdie’s finest book, the most complex in its language and ideas.  It’s the only book I know that captures both India and the west (in this case England) with true emotional richness.  There are passages that I can recall from reading the book over fifteen years ago (a plane crash, a boy eating pork, a man spitting into another man’s food) with devastating clarity.  Yet my most powerful memories of the book aren’t related to the narrative, or to the edition I read from (a fat, secondhand hardcover that the author signed for me years later).  What I remember is the physical circumstances in which I read it: over a string of late summer evenings, in my first apartment, with the windows flung open, sunk low and dreamily in the only chair I owned – a secondhand one with nubby green cushions and Danish modern stylings.  I still have the chair, refinished and reupholstered, in a corner of my living room, although it only really gets used as a step stool.  My memories of the chair, and of the book too, remain more vivid than the things themselves.

I’m a girl who is in love with her books, all her books: super-sized art books, life-changing novels, and tattered, secondhand paperbacks from college.  I live with them in piles, on shelves, and lying randomly throughout my home. Then last year, to save trees, I started reading the newspaper on a tablet, and then, because it was easier than running to the library, I started reading newly-released books on a tablet, and then, when I was packing for a summer getaway and realized that I was, suddenly, freed from lugging a separate tote bag with magazines and paperbacks, I had a revelation.  Who really needs books?

Now I’ve arrived at a more moderate position. Last night I downloaded a new novel onto my tablet, settled into my couch, and was poised to dive in when I realized that this book looked exactly like every the other book I’ve ever read on my tablet. I’m ready to surrender the pleasures of a physical book for the convenience of a tablet: an evocative dust jacket, the satisfaction of moving through a stack of pages, and the comforting bulk of the thing in you lap. But I’m frustrated with the reading software my library uses, that reduces a book to a stream of text without graphic hierarchy.  This makes it possible to download an entire book in less than a minute, which is important for accessibility.  But it renders all books in an identical font and format, so that War and Peace  looks exactly like Huckleberry Finn looks exactly like Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?  The software offers ways for a reader to adjust font size, screen brightness, and page orientation, but none to adjust page width and line spacing. The software simply floods the screen with text, and wading through it requires a special tenacity. The New Yorker and McSweeney’s have luscious, graphics-heavy apps that capture the feeling of physical issues of those magazine, but they require downloading files that are a hundred times the size of a book on my tablet.  This is one solution. But there has got to be a middle ground, a way to set font, kerning and paragraphs within an easily downloadable text file, so that each e-book is something special.