Something went a bit wrong with my Kindle the other day. It wasn't turning on and off properly; if I turned it off, it popped back on again. Weird! So I handed it to Mr Grumpy (my partner, for anybody new on here) as he is Mr Fixit for anything mechanical.
He hummed and hawed and asked me if I had reset it lately. I told him I had (just last week and quite by accident when I hit the wrong button as I was dozing off). "Well, I'm going to do it again," he said. Then he told me I hadn't been turning it off correctly as I wasn't using the Power Off button.
Ha ha! That was my chance to score one over him, which happens as rarely as rocking-horse doo-doo. "It hasn't got one!" I said triumphantly.
"There has to be one, you just haven't found it," he said, in the tired tone of a teacher fed up with explaining something tedious to a thicko student. He turned the reader this way and that; no button. I knew there wasn't. For once, I had RTFM'd (Read The Feckin' Manual).
He gave up. By now, it had finished resetting itself. He gazed at the screen, sliding through page after page. He held it up to his face and squinted at it. "Do you know you've got eighty-five books on here?" He sounded appalled rather than astonished.
"Yes."
"How on earth are you going to read them all?"
"Easily." Three a week... twenty-one weeks' supply. Less if I go on holiday. And some are reference books that I'll only read when I need them, such as How to Format Your Book for Kindle. And there are one or two I may not like and will consign straight to the Cloud, to join The Miniaturist, which I couldn't get on with at all.
Eighty-five books hardly constitute a library. They would hardly fill three shelves. Languishing in Mr G's garden shed are at least twenty-five boxes of 'proper' books - books made of paper, touch-feely reads that seem almost sensuous when compared to the act of stabbing a cold, hard screen to turn the pages. One day I shall have my own place again. My own study, my own library. I will have my external library and my internal one, inside my Kindle. And, of course, the neatest, most portable one of all - the one inside my own head.
2 comments:
Only 85? I think I've got about 5 or 600 on my Kindlefire! I do have to admit that at nearly 58 years of age, I do look at my real bookshelves and my Kindle and wonder if I'll live long enough to read all my books. When I said as much to my daughter after my near brush with death after falling down the stairs, she gave me an odd look and said, 'Is that your main concern?' Oh 'eck!
Ha ha! Of course you'll read them all. You've got another 30 years ahead of you at least, so long as you don't fall down the stairs again or trip over a cat!!!
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