Kindle
I was walking through a car park the other day when I saw one of those blue Skodas. As you know, most cars are silver these days – silver apples of the sun; that’s fair enough. There’s no law prohibiting the driving of silver cars – everyone likes them, and that is that. The blue Skoda is driven by a younger man who has deep-rooted security issues and doubts about his sexual ability.
As I walked through the car park I noticed an elderly gentleman dressed in a refined manner who had chosen to stop on a car park bench and pull out a book. (On closer inspection, this transpired to be a copy of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – no, not the Michael Moorcock book or whatever his name is.) The boy in the Skoda revved up his engine as he passed the old man. The old man simply ignored him, and turned a page of his book. For some reason this seemed to anger the boy in the Skoda, who suddenly drove full circle in front of him and started beeping his horn. Then he skidded to a halt in front of the old man and rolled down his window.
“What the flip are you doing reading that piece of rubbish?” he yelled.
The elderly gentlemen took a sip of his Special Brew and placed it down beside him. The book lay open on his lap. ”What do you mean, young man?”
“I mean what you reading that thing for? That flipping pamphlet? That bundle of old yellow papers? With little mites running up and down it?”
“I happen to enjoy reading,” the old man replied, calmly.
The young man pulled on his handbrake and leapt out of the car. He pushed the old man’s forehead sharply backwards and snatched the book. ”The only thing worth doing with this,” he said, tightly gripping the novel, “is this!” He hurled it at the road ahead, and then leapt in the car. He drove forwards so the tyres crushed the book flat and then reversed over it so it was crushed again. Then he repeated this motion about ten times before driving away in a cloud of smoke and shouting the word: “KINDLE!”
The old man hurled his half empty can of strong lager at the car, but it failed to reach its target. I would imagine that that word “KINDLE” meant nothing to the poor old man, but to us, gentle reader, that word speaks volumes.
The adverts for these things usually depicts a young man, who has no cares in the world, probably a good job working in design, a lot of money and a partiality for Top Shop. He variously runs around with his Kindle in hand, dancing around Trafalgar Square, chatting over coffee with friends (with the book in hand), and in one advert, bizarrely, wandering over some hills at night and staring down at the city. (Perhaps the last one has just buried a body and is feeling a bit bored.) The point is, none of these obnoxious little upstarts can be reading. They’re certainly not reading Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism. They are vapid fools. The reader is a pale, solitary creature, who can only just muster strength to take a sip of coffee. If he is an outgoing type, he will leave his Kindle, or his BOOK, at home. And there is one advert in which a man simply shows off the number of books that he has in his virtual library. All the while he talks the talk and shrugs his shoulders, we can see the truth and the pain in his eyes: he will never read them. Why not create a list of titles that you quite like, and type them out on a word document? Just as good.
My father is a wise man, and he told that I must always smell the book I am reading. Smell it, feel it, fold the corners of the pages, ENJOY the artwork and the packaging, judge it by its cover, live with it all your life, crack the spine if you must, but the tangible book is a beautiful and irreplaceable thing.
On the other hand, I heartily applaud the Kindle, because when printers have forgotten how to print, and when people come running back to the real world, my library is going to be worth thousands.
(Apologies in advance to Jacques Miami, who has to resort to Kindles etc due to his peripatetic lifestyle, but whom I do not doubt would prefer a library in a mansion.)
