Kindle at the Cleaners

The other day I asked my five-years-younger-than-I brother—the wit in our family—if he had taken to using a Kindle. “My Kindle,” he said, “is at the cleaners.” I’m not sure why I found that funny, but I did, and still do, and take it that he means he would never think of using this new aid to reading with which so many people are so very pleased. 

Michael Sloan

If I owned a Kindle, I, too, would take it to the cleaners but never bother to pick it up. I’m sure that this miraculous new device has lots to be said for it in the realm of convenience (many books can be stored in it at once) and ease of handling (it’s much lighter than most hardcover books), but electronically is not the way I prefer to read books. 

Some of my own books are available on Kindle, though I have never attempted to glimpse them in digital form. Years ago I had a few books on tape and thought what a pleasing snack it might be to my XXL ego to drive around town listening to my own scribblings being read aloud by an out-of-work actor. I listened to one for about three minutes and couldn’t bear it, so different were the actor’s reading rhythms from those I heard when writing the words he was now, so to say, misspeaking. 

I doubt that I would fare any better reading myself on Kindle. I wonder if I am alone in finding digital printing an invitation to skim. When I have a book or magazine in hand, I generally read every word, attentive not alone to meaning but to style. In digital form, prose has a different feel; style gives way to mere communication. If I discover an essay or article on, say, artsandlettersdaily.com that runs to more than 25 paragraphs, by the fifteenth paragraph or so I feel a tug of impatience I rarely feel with printed prose. The idea of reading serious poetry online doesn’t even qualify as an abomination.