William Davies delivered a lecture this winter on something he calls “the reaction economy” (the text is in the London Review of Books). I’ve been thinking about it for months. It’s a step beyond the attention economy we’ve become used to where companies vie for our eyeballs and lament that our attention spans are too short without acknowledging their part in making this so. The reaction economy requires you to Have an Opinion, to Show an Emotion, about everything. Like and subscribe. Rate your recent purchase. Pledge your support or show your condemnation on issues large and small. Watch videos of people reacting to songs written before they were born.

It’s exhausting.

So I’m going to stop asking for your reactions, readers. (I’ll leave the share and subscribe buttons in case you’re moved to do either on your own.) It’s enough to see that you’re reading the newsletter, or at least opening the emails. And every week I pick up a couple more people from … somewhere. Welcome! I’ll keep writing, and you keep reading. I’ll stop asking for reactions, though you can of course send me reactions or opinions or questions if you ever want to.

I deleted my Facebook account years ago, and I deleted my Twitter account last fall. I took Instagram off my phone, but I’m considering reinstalling the app because I follow a lot of neighborhood folks on there. And Lizzo. (She does not live in my neighborhood.) I joined Mastodon in 2017, but I’ve been super active there since deleting Twitter. My main account is @kristenhg@mastodon.social, if you’re on Mastodon too or are thinking about signing up and want to know someone when you do.

Unpaid endorsement alert: I bought a Kobo Libre 2, and I am in love with it. I’ve had two Kindles in my life, the last one a Paperwhite that has lasted nearly a decade. It was fine — screen is still in good shape, battery life is fine, connects to wifi, and it holds hundreds of books, as it should. But over the years I’ve used Amazon less and less — even during the height of the pandemic. I haven’t bought an ebook in ages. But I do borrow ebooks from the library via Overdrive/Libby, a habit that ramped way up during the pandemic. In order to get library books onto a Kindle, you have to borrow the book via Libby, press the “read on Kindle” button, which takes you to the Amazon page, and press the button to borrow the book there. Then it loads onto the device. Not too troubling, but a lot of steps.

Well. Kobo is owned by the company that owns Overdrive. So the library is built into the device! I just had to enter my library login credentials, and voila! I can find ebooks to borrow right from the main search bar.

Then I found out that Pocket works within the device too. I am a heavy user of Pocket; it’s how I keep links for this newsletter, but I’ve been using it as a kind of personal magazine for years. Any online article you want to read, just not right now, can be saved to Pocket with a browser extension. Then you just go to your Pocket account and everything is collected there. No more open tabs! I logged into Pocket on my new Kobo, and the … um … hundreds of articles I’ve got saved there to read all popped up on the screen. No phone or laptop required. I may catch up on all those articles. (Ha ha! I will not.)

With Overdrive and Pocket access, I realized that I could use my Kobo without paying another dollar. I have access to plenty of reading material for free. And then I immediately bought a book on sale for $3.99 (Even Though I Knew the End by C. L. Polk). And then the Gormengast trilogy because I had a coupon. And then a nonfiction title that seemed helpful because I read a review on Mastodon.

Anyway, if you’re looking for an e-reader that’s not a Kindle, the Kobo Libre 2 is great and cost about $200. If you’re looking to not pay for more books, it is theoretically possible and even easy with this device, but if you manage that, you’re stronger than me.

The book recommendation: Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk. This novel was originally published in Ukraine in 2018, and there was an English translation published in 2022. It’s a slow-paced, slow burn of a novel about a beekeeper who lives in the grey zone between Ukrainian and Russian fighting in the Donbas region. If you feel like you’ll never understand the nuance of the current war in Ukraine, or can’t catch up on either the history or the current state of conflict, start with Grey Bees. It’s the kind of novel that delivers truth through one person’s life so that you can comprehend the facts of an entire situation.

A Good-luck Visitor