I know, I know: buy a Kindle. But I like books, big books, messy full-bodied reads. Hardy, Dickens, Tolstoy. From the here and now: Price, Russo, Ishiguro, Diaz. Their weight, their textured jackets, their pages.

I end up with door stoppers because I take chances; I want to find and devour good reads, to be taken in, seduced. These led me on, but left me cold.

1) I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe. Pre-ordered from Amazon. Read 90 pages. A boring, predictable read from the master of the universe? When I tried to sell, hundreds of new copies already for sale, for $1.40. Later, a born-again friend invited me for coffee; she was troubled Charlotte gave up her virginity. All I could say was, “You read that whole book?!?”

2) Man Gone Down, Michael Thomas. Interesting set up: a black man has only a few days to regain his young family. That’s all: an interesting set up.

3) And then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris. Don’t know anyone who made it to this book’s end. Told in the collective first person.

4) The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud. New York narcissists? My kind of story! One chapter. Friend who lent won’t take it back.

5) Beautiful Children, Charles Boch. A child is missing: where’s the urgency?

6) Driftless, David Rhodes. If fly-over country is this odd, we’re doomed.

7) A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore. Same suspicions as above, re fly-over country. Provocative ideas, none fleshed out.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl. One breathless chapter.

9) Away, Amy Bloom. Rapturous reviews, ludicrous tale. When my friend Jennifer wouldn’t take it back, we left in on an empty seat at a book signing.

10) The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver. Read to page 62. Bland character heading into a Forrest Gump life. Even my niece, a Kingsolver fan, won’t take it off my hands.

We stayed longer than that, on the insistence of said 10-year-old, who kept circling back to Twombly’s oversized, intensely colorful “peony” paintings. Her priceless observation: “Now I won’t be afraid to make a mess when I make art.”

Twombly’s art is messy: paint drips, phrases scratched into the painted panels are in a shaky hand’s block-print scrawl. Words are misspelled…or are they? A haiku is repeated, carried from one painting to another, to another.

I pictured Twombly’s art as black and white, somewhat bleak. (That’s his earlier work, from the 1950s.) These works, created from 2000-2007, offer a kaleidoscope of color. Peonies are fire-engine red in one work, maroon in another: each are set against intense yellows.

Some peonies are white puffs, like huge cotton balls, the white paint left to drip down over panels of sea green. Alex thought these peonies looked like jellyfish, with their trailing tentacles. I thought the puffs looked like the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. Either way, it reminded me that even something we see as horrific — jellyfish count — can also be beautiful.

In the final room, deep green panels are overwritten with looped letters in a ghostly white paint. It’s not graffiti; rather, it’s a painterly technique that dates back to the “automatic” writing of the Surrealists (1920s).

Twombly (b. 1928, American) created the monumental works in this show as an old man; he’s 81 this year. What struck all of us was the physical strength one would need to paint on such a high, broad scale. The peonies and looped letters are huge; you can see their wide brush strokes.

Chicago is the sole venue for this Cy Twombly show: The Natural World, Selected Works, 2000 – 2007. See it. www.artic.edu

Delight, joy: at a museum? That’s rare.

Olafur Eliasson is the Danish-Icelandic artist whose installations can be seen and experienced at the Museum of Contemporary Art (220 E. Chicago Ave.) through Sept. 13.

Go. If you have children or can borrow one, take them.

Eliasson — whose “Waterfalls” captivated New York City last summer — creates spaces that turn art inside out, and sometimes bodily involve the viewer.

One of my favorite pieces, “360 degrees room for all coulors” (2002), allows you to step into the color spectrum. You’re inside the work of art.

Another one we liked is a long wide hall lit by monochromatic bulbs, which emit light in a narrow frequency, “Room for one colour” (1997). It looks inviting, a warm bright yellow. Step inside, all color is washed out of your clothes, your skin. You become shades of black and white! You are the art!

That was a favorite of Alex, my 10-year-old daughter, who likes art but dreads museums. We walked through that hall several times, and at a passage, she divided herself: “Okay, where am I black and white? Where am I color?”

Alex didn’t but I loved “Moss Wall” (1994) a room-size installation of slowly growing moss. It looked like a bumpy field of yellow-green cauliflower heads, and gave off a pleasing scent.

Our shared favorite, “Beauty” (1993), is a pitch black room that holds a mounted spotlight shining through a constant falling mist. Depending on where you stand, you see rainbows, gentle waves, ghostly images. You can walk into the mist — most kids do — which creates yet another image, and view.

The show is called “Take your TIme.” I’d promised Alex it wouldn’t be a lengthy visit; we were through the show in 30 minutes. And she was the one who asked to go back to certain installations.

This show will make anyone rethink the term “museum art.” And it will put a smile on your face, with kids or without. www.mcachicago.org

I’d been to Joe’s (60 E. Grand St.) several times, for review or to meet with editors. It’s pricey, but the seafood — especially their signature stone crab — is worth the expense. Sides and salads are freshly prepared with quality ingredients. Portions are generous.

Joe’s dining room gleams: white cloth tables, waiters in tuxedos. Why sit in the bar? The menu is the same.

Joe’s attracts a lot of tourists. More than once I’ve found myself seated opposite a half-clad group in floppy hats and flip-flops. I’m not knocking tourists; they’re great for the Chicago economy. Joe’s is so classy — refined food, divine service — I expect the patrons to be, too.

The spacious bar area attracts a different crowd. Some tourists, for sure, but typically it’s people like me and Barb, professionals who work in the neighborhood and want a meal you wouldn’t have and can’t afford everyday, in a setting that soothes. There’s a t.v. on — set to financial news — but everything else is dark wood and atmosphere.

I’d feel comfortable dining here alone.

Joe’s “colossal” crab cake ($11.95) is lightly crisped, thick, loaded with crab meat. Among the city’s best, along with Shaw’s. www.shawscrabhouse.com

The tangy coleslaw ($4.95) is more vinegar than mayo, topped with sparkling green relish, sided with thick slabs of tomato.

A meal-sized salad, the Stone Crab Louis ($13.95) was Barbara’s choice: bibb lettuce, avocado, hearts of palm, sliced egg, asparagus, stone crab.

If you’ve never tried stone crab — it’s harvested from the Gulf of Mexico — it’s a lifetime must ($17.95 for four.) Like lobster, you crack its thick shell with pliers. It’s messy, but the crab meat is heavenly: soft, white and sweet.

We passed on dessert this time, but Joe’s key lime pie ($5.95) is the real deal. It’s offered by the half-slice, too. www.joes.net/chicago.

When we returned home to Chicago, she pressed a fresh copy into my hands. So slender! A handsome cover, a mere 70 pages, now dog-eared and double-dogged by me, marked pages that hold a word or phrase or truism to be revisited.

How could a thin book be so rich?

Doty nabbed me on the first page, with his hurly-burly description of a part of Manhattan I know well. On the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, pigeons are a gang, and even in the sharp cold people huddle in groups, eating hot pretzels, sipping warm coffee, smoking. He, too, is cold and weary, his back hurts. Why is he there?

. “…I have fallen in love with a painting.”

It is a small painting, the size of school boy’s notebook, by Jan Davidsz de Heem (1606-1684). Its subject is the everyday, captured: oysters, a peeled lemon, green grapes, a glass of wine. Objects on the brink of time, Doty writes. To look at them, and look at them again and again, to be pulled into a painting, is a kind of love, he says, an intimacy.

And intimacy, he argues, is the finest human condition: to be separate, but also connected.

Doty is a poet; his language is lush. The book is both a meditation and a memoir: he takes us into the homes of his childhood, into the first home he owns and where his lover dies, and to Amsterdam for — you guessed it — a museum’s blockbuster show on Dutch still lifes.

At times I had to put this book down: it was too much, too filling. But it is a balm; its language and subject elevates. it would be the perfect book to keep in your bag, taken out and savored when you’re stuck at an airport, or riding an over-peopled bus. www.markdoty.org

“The Elegance of the Hedgehog” is one of those books. A 2007 prize-winner in France, it took me a few chapters to figure out the reason for its wide appeal. (By Muriel Barbery, translated from the French by Alison Anderson, Europa Books, $15.) A brief, unsigned review in The New Yorker led me to it.

Set in a luxury apartment building in the posh 7th arrondissement of Paris, the story is told in alternating chapters by Paloma, a precocious 12-year-old, and by the concierge, Renee, a frumpy lump of a woman who hides her intellect.

Why do we care about these two? Paloma is figuring out how to endure the inequities of this world; Renee needs a way in.

Playing the part of a typical concierge, Renee keeps a t.v. blaring by the door, and settles into a back room listening to Mahler, reading Tolstoy, spoiling her fat cat Leo.

It is Paloma who describes Renee as having the elegance of a hedgehog: “covered in quills…fiercely solitary.”

Paloma is a marvelous character. She pretends to be a typical child, but she’s not: she feels and thinks too deeply about all things, and so can’t see the point of living beyond 13. “The world is no place for princesses,” she declares. Among her complaints: her family’s disdain for the plight of African immigrants in Paris. Her suicide, she reasons, “will refresh their pea-brain memories.”

The arrival of a cultured Japanese businessman to the building changes them both. Renee sheds her self-made shell. (I nearly stood and cheered when she leaves the building to have her hair styled — and the source of her borrowed frocks is hilarious.)

For Paloma, M. Ozu is an adult she can admire. “I have met someone who seeks out others and who sees beyond.”

The ending is abrupt, and bittersweet. When I look at this book on my shelf, I want to crawl back into it.