Roll the shirts. Zip all the cables into their pouch. Put some power in the mp3 player. Charge the book. Stand there with the Kindle in one hand and the cable in the other and realise that you’ve just said “charge the book” to yourself. Stick electricity into the book so you can read it and it can update itself over the air. Charging up the wrist thing that counts my steps and monitors my sleep, sure. Charging up a book. If I wasn’t hungover, it probably wouldn’t be so dissonant. But, really, what a bloody ridiculous thing to do. I mean, the book carries a thousand books inside it. But it’s another one of those lines that belongs in an old science fiction novel. Racked next to Ray Bradbury’s MARTIAN CHRONICLES, perhaps, which I believe carried an instance of a Martian “listening to his book.”
It’s the little things that leak through.