MAYTAG: DAY FOUR

I have spent the day reading so that I can keep my mind off my hopes about my Maytag washer repair and wind up jinxing myself. What I read was just an airhead book. That is the one thing I don’t fancy about my Kindle; I cannot read a bit and then think, okay, airhead, turn to the back and check out the plot suspicions and then toss it.

Technically, you can “Go To” chapters in the book and so skip ahead, but it’s not the same as flipping to last few pages and just skimming, and then maybe taking a stab at the middle to see if there’s anything else. I have the same sort of yearning for the old card catalogue in the library. You could just stand there and let the cards flip past, your eyes focusing on spotting something that says try this one. I think it must have something to do with my age, but I just felt more connected when I was rummaging through a drawer.

Well, actually, these are kind of airhead paragraphs, so I hope you just scrolled right now, skimming to see if any great secret was going to be revealed, since, obviously, the writing is pulpy.

However, now that I my mind is on Kindles, I have a question, which I suppose I will pose to Google when I leave here. When the Kindle tells you the reading time before you begin a book, is it based on your reading rate or a time calculated from a group of readers? A lot of times, when I am reading a well-written book, I will read passages over and over again; I can tell those spots in the book by the way the pages become dingy and wrinkled. Yeah, I can highlight in the Kindle, but I don’t. It’s just not the same.

And sometimes I like to just glance at a shelf and see those books that contain prose that is almost poetry – books like The Tender Bar and A River Runs Through It, to mention just two. And then, of course, there are those books that have just a single great sentence and that is enough. The Bridges of Madison County comes to mind; the movie was better, but oh, how I loved the opening sentence:

There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads.