Just when I’d gotten used to Facebook and Twitter, along comes something completely different. It’s called a “vook” and is exactly what one would expect it to be--a combination of video and book. The product is a multimedia software application produced by a company of the same name. The first offering is a “cookvook” that displays text along with forty-five short videos of cooks preparing their favorite dishes.

Call me a traditionalist, but I cannot see myself surrounded by kindles, vooks, and “iDevices.” I much prefer the regular old book with its tantalizing title, alluring promotional jacket, and printed words coming alive on the page.

They say you can tell a lot about someone by what they read. On my desk right now I’m surrounded by four planning guides for Greece. I have a book lent me by my father called Ludicrous Laws & Mindless Misdemeanors--The Silliest Lawsuits and Unruliest Rulings of All Times. I’ve been meaning to read Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor, so that’s here. A friend lent me a paperback called The Know-It-All.

The Know-It-All is interesting. It’s non-fiction and is an account of one man’s reading of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica from a-ak through Zywiec. There is much humor in the account. Somewhere along the line the author and his wife find time to get pregnant. The baby is born after the reading is done. The book is fun and does not need to be read from A to Zed.

Then there’s A Thousand Splendid Suns by the author of Kite Runner, which I loved. I started to read A Thousand Splendid Suns but have set it aside. I read through chapter seven, at the end of which the main character Mariam is presented in marriage to a total stranger. She’s fifteen years old. Her new husband is in his mid forties. Mariam is a harami, the illegitimate progeny of a lowly stone carver’s daughter and a rich man married to three wives. I read to chapter seven when I remembered what the Taliban did to “fallen” women, those who are prostitutes, illegitimate, or have committed a crime. Sure enough, on page 327 Mariam is in the bed of a pickup truck on its way to Kabul’s Ghazi Sport stadium. On page 329 she kneels in her burqa in front of a male member of the Taliban, bows her head one last time, and is shot to death.

I admit to skipping around in the book. It’s something I often do, check the ending to see whether I can deduce how the book will be written to lead up to it. I skim to see how relationships are established, what motives are worked in. When the plot seems fairly linear and predictable, I will put a book away. A Thousand Splendid Suns was that, linear and predictable. But that’s not why I did not finish it. I was becoming emotionally invested in Mariam. I could not bear to read about her hard life, her sad end. I remember what the Taliban has done to Afghan women.