Reading Moby Dick On My Dang Telephone
Like many people today, I have a somewhat adversarial relationship with my phone. Even after going to pains to make my smartphone experience as minimalist and utility-oriented as possible, I find myself reflexively reaching for it when I've got no business doing so. Try as I may to plug up all the leaks through which algorithmically "curated" ragebait periodically seeps, I'll just start fruitlessly refreshing and re-checking messages and feeds over and over, searching for some happy transmission from the wider world. My body seems to remember a time when untold wonders lay behind the lock screen, and now it just can't leave well enough alone.
Some weeks are easier than others. Recently, the Rectangle was pointed continually toward my eyeballs as though they represented magnetic north. I was starting to get desperate. My fretful dopamine scavenging was leading me to some dark, dark places. I'm talking comments sections! Everybody knows there's nothing good to be found there! Stop, stop, for the love of God! Turn back! Surely, I told myself, this muscle memory can be used for something good. Or, at least, something much better than this!
It was at this point that the somewhat heretical idea occurred to me: what if I just read books on here? My intuition hadalways been that this would be a categorically bad experience. E-readers exist for a reason, right? And would reading in this way not be a betrayal of my deep love for books as physical objects? My personal reading had slowed a bit though (no doubt caused in part by the influnece of that bewitching gizmo in my pocket). Perhaps if I sacrificed some of the "purity" of the reading experience, I could alleviate two problems at once!
And so I downloaded a handful of ePubs from Project Gutenberg and loaded up Moby Dick on FBReader for Android. The results, so far, are great! I don't always start reading right away, but I'll often switch to it after a minute or two of mindlessly poking around when I remember that it's an option. And if I decide that I'm not in the mood to read Moby Dick, I'll often just put my phone away! What a concept. Amazing.
Besides being a really fun book, Moby Dick is a great cell phone book because it has a lot of short chapters that help to keep my place and provide a sense of accomplishment after short bursts of reading. I suspect that this might also be a good way to get at certain books which have been difficult to fit into my life because of their physical size. In fact, that's sort of where the actual inspiration for this came from. My friend mentioned that he was reading War and Peace on his phone because the physical version was just too big.
I do reckon that my choice of a matte screen protector contributes to making my phone reading experience more tolerable, but I would still recommend it to anyone whose relationship with phones or with reading is in need of a shake-up. And, heck, if nothing else, give Moby Dick a shot. Basically the first two named characters you meet are immediately thrust into an "oops there's only one bed so we have to share!" situation, and a profound tenderness quickly develops between these seafaring men. Tell me that's not better than Instagram!