I Murdered My Library (Kindle Single) Read Online Free Page B

a book to the last page and dispose of it: you return, you
return.
    I go
back to Paris in the thirties, to Jean Rhys, the novelist of unmediated longing
and yearning and rage and sexual desire, and the need for nice clothes, and the
fear of what happens to women when they are old and lose their looks and become
the woman alone upstairs, drinking alone, smoking alone, dying alone. Sentence
after apparently unremarkable sentence pass until suddenly I feel myself hit in
the solar plexus by the accumulated tension. I look back and ask, How did
you do that ?
    I
return in memory and imagination, but I return by taking a book down from the
shelf, and reading a few pages. That is a library. A full larder for the soul.
    None
of her novels are currently available as ebooks.
    I
kept Jean Rhys, I kept Anita Brookner, I kept Beryl Bainbridge. These books are
personal not only as objects but also for the intense relationship I have with
the text.
    ***
    I want to say
here that I am not hostile to new technology. Like my parents with their brand-new
television purchased to watch mystical pomp and circumstance, I am an advocate
of the modern. I had the internet when everyone was telling me it was just for
nerds and Star Trek fans.
    For a
long time I had known that the day was coming when we would not only write on a
screen but read on it too.
    In
the early years of this century, from the bath, I heard a BBC radio discussion
about the idea of reading books on a screen of some sort. A scornful patrician
voice said, ‘But you can’t take a computer to bed with you, d’you see?’,
and the argument was, in her mind, permanently closed. Lying in the suds, I
thought, But won’t they develop some kind of hand-held device ?
    My
agent told me that the early ereader prototypes were stymied by the weight of
the batteries. When the Sony ereader was introduced, the company sent one to a
bibliophile friend who despised the very idea of it, and he gave it to me. I
tried it, but the contrast between the print and the screen was so poor that it
was impossible to read by lamplight in bed. And the technology was terribly
clunky: you had to attach the thing to the computer via a cable and then
transfer files and . . . I couldn’t see it catching on.
    In
the autumn of 2010, the owner of a bed-and-breakfast I stayed in for one night
showed me her Kindle. It weighed almost nothing in the hand. The contrast was
considerably better than the Sony. I bought one. I was the first person I knew
to own a Kindle, as my parents were the first family they knew to own a TV. We
are Modernists. We like the idea of the future.
    When
I said, ‘I’ve bought a Kindle’, everyone retorted, ‘Ah, but it’s not a book’, fact,
end of . A book is a tactile object. It smells of paper. It has a defined
typeface you cannot alter. It has a cover. So, no, I replied. It is not a book
and particularly not in the sense that you do not have to spend all day lugging
around in your handbag, for example, the 900 pages of Vasily Grossman’s Life
and Fate .
    The
first book I read on my Kindle was Damon Galgut’s Booker-shortlisted In a
Strange Room . When I, or Galgut, write a novel, we do not type it into a
bound book with cover and frontispiece. We used to write on typewriters – now
we write on screens. A few writers still compose longhand, but I don’t know any;
mostly we’re staring at the empty space of Word for Mac or that convoluted
writers’ software, Scrivener. So when we are writing, as I’m doing now, a
screen is the medium, and what matters is not paper or the cover or the binding
or the smell of ink, but the words. The ‘real’ book that I write is 12-point
Arial at 150 per cent zoom, with the page set in draft view so that it fills
the screen. Double spaced, margins justified.
    I
think many writers are notoriously conservative and superstitious about their
work methods, with rituals and incantations and other rubbish we won’t mention,
apart, obviously, from the