I may be a huge weirdo, but I read books in the shower. Yes, they get wet. But they do dry back out afterwards, albeit with some ripply looking pages. Small sacrifice. I also often read in the hot tub, as well as whenever I get around to taking a bath, both of which tend to get books a bit damp as well, though not as much as the shower. I have found this task a bit easier while showering in Europe - Italy, and France, in places where you use a handheld showerhead and turn it off whenever you’re between rinsings to save H2O (Europeans as a whole are much more environmentally conscious than we wasteful Americans).
Why do I want to read while showering, you may ask. Well, my own modern American upbringing has so bombarded me with media from all directions at all times that I can’t seem to bear not to multitask most of the time, and I find myself rather bored doing just one activity at once. My sophomore year roommate once took a picture of me brushing my teeth with one leg up on the sink to stretch it and a large textbook sitting on my leg, with a highlighter in my other hand. Somehow I’ve been trained to see any single task as strangely unproductive, and, well, boring. As Harriet the Spy’s Ole Golly told me recently in an audiobook I was listening to while driving, you might as well play checkers while you watch TV, because both are boring to do alone but provide enough entertainment when done together.
So after wondering just how to keep my books relatively dry during a particularly wet-booked shower just now, I decided to search the internet to see if anyone had actually come up with any sort of invention yet that allows you to read in the shower. Here’s what I found:
- Durabooks, a company that makes waterproof books with pages made out of a nontoxic, synthetic glue-paper material. I highly approve of this, but they seem to have only six titles available: a few short story collections, as well as two erotic story compilations (they know where our minds are in the shower). A good idea (and I might purchase one at some point), but not exactly what I’m looking for. I want to be able to take whatever book I’m currently in the middle of reading right into the shower with me.
- Another interesting find: waterproof notebooks. These could definitely be useful at some point, I should think.
If any of you are budding inventors out there, invent me some sort of casing or covering I can place on top of my book that can be easily put on or removed that keeps the water from getting to it and somehow allows you to still turn the pages. Or just put one of those waterproof TV screens in my shower for me.
