Kindling

This to record that, for the first time for months, perhaps a small number of years, my Kindle has reappeared on my bedside table. A fairly old Kindle now, rather like the one above, lifted from Wikipedia.

A few hiccups during the recharge and I worried whether the battery had expired through lack of use, but after a while all was well. The Kindle was up and running again.

The prompt for all this was watching the version of 'Vanity Fair' offered by ITVX on our nearly new Samsung, fairly smart television, an antidote to overdosing on much more recent police dramas, with all their sweat and gore. This one, a perfectly decent effort, one of many that have been made over the years, was made in six episodes in 1998, as detailed at reference 5. All of which resulted in my wanting to look at the book again, in my case a fat Penguin Classics, perhaps 3cm thick, but long since retired. The thought was that it was probably on the Kindle, which indeed proved to be the case. No need to extract a copy from Surrey Libraries, our local Oxfam shop or anywhere else.

Helped along by using the search provided for 'pumpernickel', I started fairly near the end and was pleased to find that this book has worn pretty well - despite it being getting on for 200 years since it was written.

I have also been reminded of the convenience of Kindles for reading in bed. Unlike a real book, one can read a Kindle more or less single handed, which I find much more comfortable when lying down than two handed. Perhaps the Kindle and all the classics thereon will get another outing!

PS 1: I take a few minutes this morning to run down the original purchase, working my way from reference 1, via 'view page source', to reference 2, from August 2011. So roughly twelve years ago. With quite a lot of notice, so presumably quite a lot of activity in the rest of 2011 and going on into 2012. I imagine it dies down a bit after that. The list of contents now occupies fifteen pages, mostly from the classical repertoire of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with just the odd bit of something modern. Several of the 'The collected works of X' which are offered by Amazon for a nominal 99p or something of that sort - agreeably cheap if a bit fiddly to use.

PS 2: while the Kindle is up and running, the cable which came with it for charging and connection is not so well. The white plastic casing has crumbled at the USB/power plug end, revealing the wire sheath to the core. It still works, but I thought replacement might be a good idea - to find that the replacement was not good for all the things that one could do with the original. Something else that I never got around to sorting out.

PS 3: there were some philosophical thoughts first thing this morning. About how a novel can get away with a lot more on the page than it can on the screen. A novel on the page is well on the way to being a dream, with what counts being the stringing together of impressions and sensations. And over, say, three hundred pages, it does not need to all hang together in the way of a story told in a court-room. There is plenty of room for loose ends, if not outright contradictions. Doubts and disbelief, as my mother used to say, could be happily suspended. While in the much simplified version on the screen, usually consumed in much less time, often in just the one sitting, such things stand out more, irritate more. However, recounting these thoughts now, I am not so sure. But I still think that there is something here which will bear further thinking.

References

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=kindle.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/08/there-old-etonians-get-everywhere.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_Fair_(novel).

Reference 4: Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackery - 1848.

Reference 5: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159090/.