Joys of (e)reading
Sorry I’ve been so MIA. It was my sister’s high school graduation earlier this week, and 15+ family members (yes, fifteen plus) basically took over the house. Family get-togethers really bring out the misanthrope in me.
However, even with all the chaos, I did manage to squeeze in time to finish The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and before I post my review, I want to share my Kindle experience. (Try to pretend you haven’t read other accounts…just sayin’.)
Reading on a Kindle
The nifty “Welcome to Kindle” message by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos urges you to “forget about this device and get lost in the book,”, and for the most part, that promise is happily delivered. Clicking the ‘next’ button wasn’t all that different from turning the page of a book, and it is easy to get lost inside the story. I loved how I could adjust the text size to something more suitable for my blind-as-a-bat eyesight, and how lightweight the Kindle is-I used to hate picking up hefty books like Anna Karenina or The Brothers Karamazov, because physically they were hard to read after a while. You had to prop them up, but then when you got to the middle you had to crack the spine or else the thick pages would collapse on you… there’s none of that messiness with a Kindle. No wonder I see it everywhere on the subway now - you just take it with you and go.
Back to my point about being absorbed in an ebook, I think it’s easy, with a Kindle, to get too lost within the book, something that I haven’t read in reviews of e-readers in general. Sometimes, as my fingers almost compulsively pressed the ‘next page’ button, it was hard to grasp a sense of a break in the narrative. With an actual book, you have the luxury of extra spacing or a few blank pages to give the narrative a sense of time and distance between events. I’m thinking specifically of those jaw-dropping blank pages at the end of Stephenie Meyer’s The Host, which made me go, “omg omg omg is that really the end?!? No? WHEW.” You can’t get that same sense on a Kindle or any other e-reader, because even if you have a blank page, how long does clicking take -- .0001 of a second? And as for extra spacing, forget about it - it’s barely noticeable on the screen. By its nature, an e-reader encourages you to push forward and onward with a story, but I think you lose a sense of natural breaks or gaps in the narrative-you just keep reading on and on (until you decide to take a break).
With a Kindle, I also found it hard to refer to previous chapters, unless I remembered to bookmark a certain page. It’s more of a hassle to press the “previous page” button and skim through pages and pages, so unless I bookmarked something, I’m really not going to bother finding it again. There is a search option, but I haven’t really fiddled around with its effectiveness yet.
However, what I do love most is that I never have to wait to go to the store to read the next installment (assuming it’s out). Once I finished Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, I immediately checked out Girl Who Played With Fire, and I put it on my wishlist. I could even download the first chapter for free, if I wanted a teaser. Of course, this set-up could potentially be dangerous to my credit card bill, so we’ll see how that goes.
However, even with all the chaos, I did manage to squeeze in time to finish The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and before I post my review, I want to share my Kindle experience. (Try to pretend you haven’t read other accounts…just sayin’.)
Reading on a Kindle
The nifty “Welcome to Kindle” message by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos urges you to “forget about this device and get lost in the book,”, and for the most part, that promise is happily delivered. Clicking the ‘next’ button wasn’t all that different from turning the page of a book, and it is easy to get lost inside the story. I loved how I could adjust the text size to something more suitable for my blind-as-a-bat eyesight, and how lightweight the Kindle is-I used to hate picking up hefty books like Anna Karenina or The Brothers Karamazov, because physically they were hard to read after a while. You had to prop them up, but then when you got to the middle you had to crack the spine or else the thick pages would collapse on you… there’s none of that messiness with a Kindle. No wonder I see it everywhere on the subway now - you just take it with you and go.
Back to my point about being absorbed in an ebook, I think it’s easy, with a Kindle, to get too lost within the book, something that I haven’t read in reviews of e-readers in general. Sometimes, as my fingers almost compulsively pressed the ‘next page’ button, it was hard to grasp a sense of a break in the narrative. With an actual book, you have the luxury of extra spacing or a few blank pages to give the narrative a sense of time and distance between events. I’m thinking specifically of those jaw-dropping blank pages at the end of Stephenie Meyer’s The Host, which made me go, “omg omg omg is that really the end?!? No? WHEW.” You can’t get that same sense on a Kindle or any other e-reader, because even if you have a blank page, how long does clicking take -- .0001 of a second? And as for extra spacing, forget about it - it’s barely noticeable on the screen. By its nature, an e-reader encourages you to push forward and onward with a story, but I think you lose a sense of natural breaks or gaps in the narrative-you just keep reading on and on (until you decide to take a break).
With a Kindle, I also found it hard to refer to previous chapters, unless I remembered to bookmark a certain page. It’s more of a hassle to press the “previous page” button and skim through pages and pages, so unless I bookmarked something, I’m really not going to bother finding it again. There is a search option, but I haven’t really fiddled around with its effectiveness yet.
However, what I do love most is that I never have to wait to go to the store to read the next installment (assuming it’s out). Once I finished Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, I immediately checked out Girl Who Played With Fire, and I put it on my wishlist. I could even download the first chapter for free, if I wanted a teaser. Of course, this set-up could potentially be dangerous to my credit card bill, so we’ll see how that goes.