Monday, October 26, 2015

Learning to Read

It's been about four years since I got my first Kindle Fire. When I bought it, I didn't really have any intention of reading books on it. I just wanted a cheap tablet. Gradually though, I started buying books. At first I just took advantage of really good deals, like free books or all of Walker Percy's book for $2.00 each. Then I bought some more. I like the idea of being able to go on a trip and just take that Kindle instead of eight books. You have to have at least eight books because you never know what type of book you're going to want to read at any given moment, and they're heavy and take up a lot of room.

Pretty soon, I was reading everything on the Kindle Fire. It was convenient in a lot of ways. Easy to take with me, and easy to take notes. I'm no good at taking notes with pen or pencil. I just don't do it. All-in-all I liked it, and I still like it, but then, there is the glaring problem. (There's a glare problem, too, but I can deal with that.)

You can do a lot more on a Kindle Fire than read. You can check your email incessantly. You can check Facebook. You can play solitaire. You can take pictures. It is, basically, the most distracting item that I own.

Too much stuff
All this distraction militates against sitting for long periods of time and reading your book. Sometimes the distraction creeps in in subtle ways. What is this French word? Oh, I can just look it up on Google. Twenty minutes later, I get back to the book. After awhile I realized that I was incapable of just sitting down and reading for more than about 10 minutes at a time. This is really bad!

So, I have spent the last few months training myself to read without interrupting myself. Doing what I used to do for hours at a time if left alone, has been a real battle. Lately, it has begun to get better. For one thing, many of the books that I have been reading for the 52 Authors series are not available as ebooks. When I'm reading a real book, the distractions are still close by, but not actually part of what I'm holding.

There's a lot written about problems with the internet. People are worried about security and the potential for constant surveillance, and those are very real problems. But what really bothers me is how it changes me. All my life, one of my greatest pleasures has been sitting with a books and losing myself for afternoon or evening. For years, I've been looking forward to the day when I retire and can read the books that I never have time for now. I don't want to lose this opportunity because I'm wasting my time doing worthless things.

AMDG

7 comments:

  1. I swore up and down that I'd never trade in my books for an electronic reader, but in the past year or so I have begun to read a few books on my phone. One thing I realized: I do a lot of reading in the dark. Either I'm walking the baby during the night or lying in bed beside the crib, but I can't just turn on a light. The e-book reader, which has a dim night mode, comes in really handy.

    This year I read the whole of Boswell's "Life of Johnson", plus "Anna Karenina", and a bunch of Chesterton's books this way. By reading on my phone I have finally found a practical way to take advantage of Project Gutenberg; I would never sit at my computer and read on the screen, but I find reading on the phone not too bad, especially considering the alternative (ie. not reading at all).

    I don't find distractions too much of an issue. My reading time is scarce, and when I get to it I am pretty focused. Sleepy too.

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    1. Right. I think I would do okay reading on the phone in a pinch or on what I call my plain old Kindle. It's the bells and whistles that distract me.

      AMDG

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  2. I've been wanting to reply to this for a couple of days but have been too distracted. Not kidding.

    I don't read anything but journalism (fairly short pieces), blogs, and Facebook on my phone. It isn't so much that I get distracted from one thing to another when using it as that the very fact that I'm using it is generally a distraction from something else. I really don't care for reading on it. I have a "plain old Kindle" but I don't use it very much. Of course it doesn't offer any distractions.

    But where the distraction is a *major* problem for me is in writing. I write on the computer, and I have a hard enough time focusing anyway, but with the entire internet only a mouse click away, I have a terrible time staying with anything. Same syndrome as you describe, except that it's writing instead of reading that I'm being distracted from. The problem with switching to paper and pen is that I'm eventually going to have the drudgery of typing it into the computer anyway.

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  3. Yes, it's a problem with writing, too. The main problem being that when I'm writing a blog post I frequently want to find a quote or a picture and once I'm out there in cyberspace anything can happen. Chances are when I get back to the blog, I will not have done what I originally left to do.

    AMDG

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  4. About writing by hand, for one thing it's harder on the joints and that is increasingly a problem for me. But more than that, I think it is computers that have allowed me to write. I really think that the ability to be able to type almost as quickly as I think and to edit as I write are what made writing a possibility for me.

    AMDG

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  5. Yeah, I have the same physical problem, so I don't know if I could do it for very long. And I agree about the speed and the editing. I mean, it didn't make writing *possible* for me, but it's awfully nice. Another problem with handwriting is that I've done it so little for so long that when it comes time to type in what I wrote that I sometimes have trouble deciphering it.

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  6. Sometimes I have trouble deciphering my typing.

    I just have a real problem looking at a page with words crossed out, and other words written in and arrows indicating that things need to go elsewhere. If there is much of that, I can't stand looking at it long enough to fix it. I paralyzes my brain or something.

    AMDG

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