Reading Fiction on the Computer with the Kindle App

I'm going to try an imperfectly controlled experiment.  Yesterday I finished reading the novella Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad.   I had started reading it on my Kindle Fire Tablet, but I've been having difficulties with that keeping its charge, and if I use it to play music while I read then it drains the electricity way too fast, plus the volume on the sound is too low even at the max setting. So for a while I used the Tablet as a reader, but then used my phone as the audio player.  It's a clunky solution, but do-able. (I may eventually get an iPad mini, but it is pricey so I'm going to hold off for a while.)  So I thought to try reading on my computer.  For a while I tried that on my laptop, setting it up in Tablet mode (so the keyboard is unavailable), which is a possible solution for me but I need a good chair and the screen at the right height for that to work.  My regular computer, an iMac, has that.  The laptop is in the basement, sitting on a table where the screen is too low,  and a cheapie chair is what I use when I access it (after doing the treadmill, to cool down for a few minutes).  The thought that getting both the technology and the physical environs to work in concert in support of my reading is why I'm experimenting with reading on the computer.  In the past, the Kindle app has itself been unstable, which made this impossible.  But the current version works reasonable well.

Over the past several years I've taken to listen to music, mainly Chopin, as I would do book reading.  I'm much less likely to do that if I'm reading pieces from the New York Times or some magazine, perhaps because doing the latter has a stopping point in the near future (when the article fully is read) as distinct from a book, especially one with rather long chapters. The music is there to block out audible distractions, particularly other people in the house talking (or if I'm out having a coffee other people having a conversation at an adjacent table).  For this purpose, I really like this "album" for which there is so much music that once you start it the music plays for as long as you will read, with only momentary pauses when one piece ends and another begins.   The music itself, however, sometimes is a source of distraction in that if a piece catches my attention then I want to know its form - waltz, nocturne, or ballade for example and I want to know the key that it is written in.  So I'm apt to depart the reading momentarily to find out this information.  This sort of distraction pervades reading with an electronic device connected to the Internet.  There is a compulsion to check email, Facebook, and for me also to check how much my most recent blog post has been accessed, and likewise for my most recent Tweet.  A different part of the experiment, which I will begin later today with some paper based reading, a short story and the latest issue of the New Yorker, is whether I can get into it sufficiently that this compulsion vanishes.   Part of the experiment is to determine, when my attention is more squarely on the reading than on these various distractions, is it the medium that matters or is it the nature of what I'm reading.  I know I find fewer things that I read absorbing these days.  But I'm much less sure why that is.

There is also distraction with the book itself.  I don't recall other fiction I've read that has extensive footnotes.  In the Kindle version, these appear as hyperlinks.  In the first chapter, if you click on a link it brings up a different screen with some explanation of the recent jargon/terminology used in the text.  I started by ignoring them, but after skipping perhaps a dozen then dutifully clicked and read each of them.  The background information was useful.  There is also the technique used in the writing of the story itself, which is told from the perspective of Marlow, the character who is sent to find Kurtz deep within Africa.  Marlow is the narrator.  But I found it difficult to understand, especially when transitioning from one scene to the next, what was going on, and was this actually happening or only something in Marlow's mind.  Indeed, at the start of the book, Marlow seems to be a passenger in a boat on the Thames, and the story is what he relates to the other passengers as their way to pass time together.  But once he gets into traveling up river to find Kurtz, he never returns to those passengers who were listening to the story.  It's as if now he is living the story in the present tense.  Further, while the expression "heart of darkness" is used multiple times in the story, it is still unclear to me whether it is only meant as describing a location, the part of the river and the immediate surrounding area where eventually they did find Kurtz, or if it is meant as a double entendre, to also describe Kurtz as an emotional being, one so wrapped up in the amassing of ivory that he disregarded his fellow human beings and was capable of doing atrocities to some of them.

I have not yet read any interpretations of the book, other than the chapters that proceed the novella written by somebody else, meant as an aid in understanding how Conrad came to write this book and his own trip to the Congo, traveling up river. There is Conrad's diary of that trip, which is included in the Kindle edition of the book after the novella, and I've not yet read it.  Perhaps it will illuminate further.

But I'm going to leave that for a while.  The next Kindle book I plan to read is Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, several years after it was the book that everyone else was talking about.  It may be that reading non-fiction, particularly economics, is sufficiently unlike reading fiction, because you need a pencil and paper in available to work through equations so they are understood.  That's definitely the way it was for me in graduate school.  But I will start out reading as if the experience is novel-like.  And we'll see where that goes.

The managing of the compulsion for updates of information may not have an ideal solution.  And maybe I can train myself away from it (though signs point to the opposite conclusion).  But I think we should experiment with possible solutions, imperfect as they may be.  That's what I intend to do.