I am an unabashed novel reader

It was a long and busy weekend of getting ready for Thanksgiving and guests. It was broken up on Saturday with a trip to Invesco field as the illicit party guest of my friend Kristen and a brunch on Sunday with Beth and Erica. Both were nice. The dinner at Invesco was rather unspectacular, the standard catered food and overpriced drinks, etc. But we did get to walk out on to the Mile High Field and look out on the empty stadium which was pretty cool. The actual field was roped off, so I didn't get to run into the end zone and do the Stacy Shuffle, but oh well, it was cool nonetheless.

Brunch on Sunday was lovely. I always enjoy catching up with my girls and chatting up. I made a bit of an ass of myself talking on subjects where I was vastly the inferior, but I'm sure the girls forgive me, right? By the end of Sunday night, I was so tired that I called Richard Marx, Karl Marx. We had a good laugh about that and jokes about the proletariat knowing how to rock and such.

There has been much press this week about Kindle, the new eBook reader. I'm very pro-technology, but I just can't get behind an electronic reader. Amazon launched the product this week and Jeff Bezos said, "the book is so highly evolved and so suited to its task that it's very hard to displace." He wants books to stop being so darn analog. They are textand images, right? So they should lend themselves to digitization. For example, I get all of my news online and would never subscribe to a newspaper. The medium, for me, lends itself to electronic delivery. Conversely, my father wakes up everyday and reads the paper from start to finish while he eats his peanut butter and toast. Could he cancel his subscription and eat his breakfast in front of the computer? Sure, but he doesn't. He likes the ritual.

I am the same way about books. I like the look and feel and even smell of books. I like the way they look on the shelf. I like the differences in cover size and shape and color and the random unevenness of the books. I like reading in the bathtub or on the porch or in the grass. I like peeking ahead to see how many pages are left in the chapter and deciding if I should stop now and go to bed or keep reading. I like the heft of my textbooks and the strain I feel when I lift them up on the desk. I like having 3-4 books going at a time, all of them sitting by my bedside, open and laid flat to mark the page: overlapping inverted Vs that look like birds or accent marks. I like the small stains and fingerprints in my cookbooks where I turned the page with my soup stained finger. I like revisiting my earmarks years later to see what was so important to me in 2001 or 1991. I like when the power goes out and I can light a couple of candles and finish the book.

Books are personal and personally historical. They are portable and tactile and perfectly suited to their task. I know that eventually all research will digitize and that is fine. I don't mind the rather clinical reading that accompanies research. But I enjoy the anachronisms and oddities of print. When I travel I will have my cell phone, my iPod, my laptop, and maybe a portable DVD player, but my books will always be books.