A few weeks ago I decided to head west. Work had gotten hectic and I needed some time to get away and just drain. I figured that west Texas with its long stretches of blacktop highway and lunar terrain would be just the place for my neurons to regroup. While I was packing my electronic backpack (okay, I was headed towards lunar terrain, but I still needed some connection to civilization) with my iPad 2, my iPhone, and two digital cameras with all their wires, cards, and batteries, I also tossed in my old Kindle just for fun. I hadn’t used the thing in months and months. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I had used it.

After spending seven straight hours on the road, unloading my stuff in the granny room (the hotel had been built in 1902 and I didn’t see where it had changed much since then), and chowing down on some real country cooking, I still had a few hours before the sun would leave the big Texas sky. I could’ve reached for the iPad 2, there was a kid downstairs in the parlor who was playing on his or picked up one of the cameras and scouted around town. But I wanted to get away from an LED screen for a while. I took the Kindle, it’s the old e-ink model, and headed outside to one of the old rocking chairs on the porch.

I rocked and read for over three hours (it takes the sun a long time to go down in west Texas). I started and finished two small books on Bible prophecy (I wouldn’t recommend them), and started Frank Norris’s McTeague. I grabbed a bite to eat from the drugstore across the street (more of a old-fashioned general store) and I read while I ate. I walked back to my room and read for another three hours. Like the terrain, it was almost otherworldly to tune out all the digital noise and wrap myself up in a few books. Over the next few days the iPad saw precious little sun and two rolls of film would have been more than enough for the trip.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I came back from the edge of nowhere and now I carry my Kindle with me everywhere I go. I haven’t counted, but I think I’ve read seven more books since I pulled into the driveway. I got my truck washed this afternoon and cleared twenty pages of N.T. Wright’s Romans for Everyone while I waited.

I don’t know if my neurons had the chance to regroup, but I’m glad I that I reintroduced myself to my Kindle. It’s reignited my love for reading. It won’t be long before I can say that it reignited my desire to write, too.