(Since November, 2016, I have written few blog posts. The world is too much with me and it’s moving too fast. But I’m trying to find the quiet space.)
I got a smart phone, about a year and a half ago–yes, I was one of the last people on the planet not to have one–for one major reason: group text conversations with my daughters. As anticipated, in addition to that fun capability, I’ve found some things about it that I like. Also some I find annoying. But one of my favorite things was totally unexpected: I like to read books on my phone.
(We’re safely past the screen versus paper moment, right? Because I’m firmly on the side of both. Of course I am grateful for the screen option when I’m planning vacations and appreciate the liberty of not worrying about packing the books I want to read plus the backups in case any of those disappoint. And there are books, like poetry, I’d never choose to read onscreen. There are books I know I’d like to pass along to a friend or a daughter after I’m finished. And there are the ones I simply want to own, to put on my shelf. Maybe I won’t read them again, but I want to live among them. You know what I mean.)
Most of the time, whatever I’m reading on the page, I’ve also got something else on the screen. And by screen, I never mean Kindle, which lost me when, in an upgrade, ads replaced those silly drawings of authors where Emily Dickinson looked like someone in my high school yearbook. So, the phone.
And I’m not talking about quick little reads either. I’ve read The Forsyte Saga, all three books and two “interludes.” I’ve read Grant, the Ron Chernow tome I could barely lift in its 1104-page form. What’s best is that wherever I am with a few minutes to spare, my phone is probably there, too. Waiting in the dentist’s office, waiting for a friend to arrive for lunch, waiting while the prescription’s being filled, while the car’s being inspected. All those would-have-been-annoying moments suddenly become a chance to sneak in one more page or two. It’s almost like reading just one more chapter under the covers with a flashlight.
Maybe it’s almost the same thing, the secret moment—physically comfortable, intimate. The palm of your hand. The public setting and the stolen private moment when no matter who else is around, it’s just you and the story.