An expat describes how she finally broke down and parted with her print-only loyalism:
I felt dirty watching the download bar turn blue, but once I began, I found I didn’t know how to stop. First came Alice Munro. The verisimilitude between Munro’s Southern Ontario and the Kabul expatriate community was striking. Both were a whorl of gossip. Both involved dinners parties made from canned provisions. Both were rife with what Munro called the “great shock of pleasure” that life affords you sometimes. And both were populated by the “wrecked survivors of the female life,” girls who grew up to be dissatisfied women, who found ways of negotiating with the rough terrain of an inherently male landscape. The small humiliations, the minutiae of everyday existence, the intensity of the social gaze—farm towns of rural Canada have much in common with this war zone capital.
Next came Junot Díaz’s short stories, then Zadie Smith’s novel, then George Saunders’ latest. I rationed out these texts as if they were wartime succor. Not only does downloading take a long time, spending $10 to $15 per book seemed slightly insane in a country where that amounted to an average worker’s weekly pay.
Once I tried explaining the concept of ebooks—that they cost more than three watermelons and cannot be lent to someone—to an Afghan friend and was swiftly ridiculed for my vanity. He never said as much, of course. But he did give me a look that Afghans often give me: a look that seemed to say, “Youuu eeeeediot.”
The Dish 