2:05am June 28, 2013

Reading Harry Potter on Kindle is making me rethink language comprehension.

I had no idea of the amount of trouble it causes me to hold a book and turn pages, until I began reading the Harry Potter series on my Kindle.

I’ve read the books dozens of times before. But what I’m reading now is totally different. What I see now versus what I saw before, is almost as huge a difference as when I go back and look at childhood memories from when my language comprehension was terrible.

Like in childhood memories… I can see all these patterns of how everyone moved, and I catch all their big movements but I miss a lot of what they were saying, our all of it. This makes me misunderstand what was happening as often as not. And even when I became able to understand some language some of the time, I still missed huge chunks of what was going on.

Like the time in third grade that I didn’t understand I was supposed to be giving a report on Manet, until I saw my partner getting up and talking with a hat on like the people in the paintings, so I hurriedly covered myself in orange construction paper to simulate nudity because lots of the pictures were nude, then stood in front of the class and… my memory ends there. Only later did I piece together what happened for real abd what I had missed. A 7-year-old should understand more language than that.

I’m just glad I didn’t strip naked, which I still sometimes did at that age. But the hat was putting something on, nit taking something off, so I figured I had to make a costume, not remove my clothes.

Now that I am reading Harry Potter, it’s just like that. I missed skill of the fine detail, the really amazing stuff, all the tiny things Rowling put into her books to make the world more interesting and detailed. I’ve taken to highlighting the major things I missed. There’s a lot.

By way of explanation, I have neuromuscular problems and a movement disorder, both of which make holding books and turning pages difficult. I’m also autistic and have never had the best language comprehension. So it figures that if I’m concentrating on holding the book and turning the pages, all kinds of language details are dropped entirely.

So I am very glad I have a Kindle. It’s made me twenty times more able to enjoy books I could never fully understand before no matter how many times I read them. All these times I read them I never once caught this stuff, nor did I catch more of this stuff with repeated readings until I got it for Kindle.

Which is reason number 5734 that I hate the way some people try to make it sound like ebooks aren’t real books. But then I’ve always been annoyed by that because the entire reason I first got a Kindle was because I was too weak to hold books and turn pages over and over. This is just one more reason to prefer the Kindle over paper books. The characters no longer look like the broadest movements of ill-defined shadows in the background.