Blackened
Fingers and Bent Pages, or
Why I Like But
Don’t Yet Love My Kindle
After a pleasant hour reading The New Yorker yesterday, I put down the magazine and noticed black
ink smudging my thumbs and the inside of my right middle finger. On the way to wash my hands, I grabbed
a large, thick book I’d finished reading, intending to put it back in the
study. First, though, I had
to divest it of its ‘bookmarks’ – two Harris Teeter receipts, a Duke Power bill
envelope, an ancient and toothless matchbook from a New York restaurant, and a
cardboard coaster.
I do have actual bookmarks, but they’re often not around
when I need them. Hence, the use
of whatever random bits of paper are within reach. I take them out if they interfere with re-shelving but often
leave the smaller ones in place, tiny time capsules of the Knausgaardian
minutiae of my life. To rediscover
them months or years later is to receive small shocks of pleasant nostalgia,
rather like coming across the marginal notes, underlinings, and stars scribbled
in old textbooks, or the ubiquitous folded corners that, in my case, range in
size from dainty turn-downs to ruthlessly large triangles depending on the
importance of the mutilated page.
This is one reason I love print books and magazines. Not only do they have material
personalities of their own (their covers, their weight, their fonts, their
smell); they also mark the process and circumstances of reading . . . and, in
the form of ink smudges, paper cuts, and red marks left when one falls asleep
on top of a hardcover, they mark the reader herself.
E-books cannot do this. Not being quite as ancient as Mary Worth, who was a senior
citizen when the comic strip debuted in 1938 so now is about 130 years old, I
do have a Kindle. And I like it a
lot. It’s superior to print books
when the print is small or the bulk is big. You can get free downloads of most classic literature, so
you can be equipped when seized with an overwhelming urge to re-read Jane
Austen or finally get around to neglected Dickens novels like Little Dorrit. Most seductively, virtually instantaneous delivery means you
need never be without something good to read, nor do you have to suffer
deferred gratification.
Yet I don’t love it.
Yes, Kindle does have some sort of annotation function (I’ve never used
it) and the electronic equivalent of crimped page corners. But it’s not the same as a ‘real’ book
or magazine. Accessed through an
electronic reader, books lose their individuality and become disembodied
narratives. I become anxious when,
having stopped reading for a couple of minutes, the device automatically goes
to sleep and shows me a creepy picture of Emily Dickinson. A Kindle doesn’t function well for art
books, most magazines, or other works with lots of photos or illustrations (I
suppose I could upgrade to Kindle Fire, as I have a plain-Jane model, but I
don’t like a small format for reading visually rich things . . . which is also
why I’ve never watched a movie or TV show on a computer, pad, tablet, or god
forbid, a phone).
Then there are the big-picture issues, like Amazon driving
every other bookseller on the planet out of business, like enabling bad writers
to self-publish horrible novels, like contributing to the general cyborgization
of our culture, as people seem less and less able to unplug themselves from
their gadgets. On the other side
of the argument, e-books neither contribute to global deforestation nor to
increased domestic book clutter.
And they have a benefit I didn’t expect: anonymity. When you’re sitting in a waiting room or a coffee shop
occupying time with your Kindle, no one knows what you’re reading. You are not marked as an intellectual or
a plebe, a spiritual person or a sociopath. Your choice of reading matter does not lead to unwanted
conversations with nosey or obnoxious strangers. Which, unless you’re trying to make the acquaintance of random
book lovers or are an academic trying to impress your peers by lugging around
the latest translation of a trendily unreadable Continental author,
is a very good thing. Maybe even a
lovable one.
(Point of privilege: I do
like Kafka, in any format.)
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