Santa brought me a Kindle, which was very nice. There followed a day of bewilderment and resentment (you have to pay Amazon $40 to stop ads from popping up on the homepage and screen saver). And then came the moment when I happily put down the public library’s hardcopy of Brothers Karamazov and picked up where I left off on this little slate grey hand mirror.
This compactness is an advantage that I got immediately. I’ve come to hate big bulky tomes. Just last week I borrowed from LAPL the one-volume version of the latest Dostoevsky biography. One volume, but it’s three inches thick! Never again.
Likewise I’m already fantasizing about unburdening myself of some of the books that clutter up my rooms. Sure, probably a third of them have sentimental value, or are very nice editions, and I’m keeping them whatever. But what about the mountain of cracked, yellowed Penguin paperbacks that were already old and worn when I bought them?
Using the Kindle is fun but I don’t quite grasp what I’m doing. I’m still at the stage of being intensely aware of all the physical activities that have been part of my reading life for 50 years, and that I’m not experiencing them. Is what I’m doing really reading?
In The Adolescent, Arkady looks around his friend Vasin’s tidy apartment, and comments, “I don’t know, but I like it better when books are scattered about in disorder, when studies are at least not turned into a sacred rite.” Maybe the Kindle de-ritualizes reading a bit, but if so, it’s probably a good thing. A chance to refocus on content. I keep thinking I’m reading from a scroll, like readers a couple thousand years ago.
Comments