When I saw Disney’s Beauty and the Beast for the first time, I took two thoughts away from it:
1) When Beast showed Belle into the castle’s library: “Ohmigawd! I want that!”
2) When Beast was finally returned to his human form: “Aw man, he’s not hot at all. Someone needs a nose job.”
There are many things I want out of life, some attainable (a puppy!) and some not (telekinesis!!). But one thing I’ve always wanted, and will have, is my own library. A room dedicated to books! Just imagine!
I love, love, love reading and try to read at least one book per week. Some weeks I’m successful, some weeks I’m drunk. But dammit, I try! I love the feeling of books, of the pages between my fingers. I love getting lost in a world someone else has created and imagining what the characters and locations look like. I even love that weird smell that every used bookstore has. I can’t go into a bookstore without walking out with a new book. Needless to say, I have quite a collection going. But my books don’t have a room of their own. And everyone needs a room of one’s own, not just female authors.
(I also love alphabetizing my books, but that may be due to an undiagnosed case of OCD.)
So you can imagine my horror at the introduction of “e-readers” into our world. I loathe these little machines. Don’t we have enough electronics to carry around with us already? At this rate, we’ll all be sterile within ten years from the waves shooting through the air.
And so, my top 5 reasons why e-readers need to go the way of the Dodo:
5. You can tell a lot about a person from their bookshelves. Are there mostly fiction books (oooh, creative and imaginative), non-fiction (well hello, Mr. Intellectual), textbooks (student), fantasy (nerd). Imagine going over to someone’s home, looking at their shelves, and seeing books by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, or only Harlequin Romances. Take it as the warning sign it is and get the fuck outta there! An e-reader can hide the worst of sins, and will make your home look empty.
4. Judgment of strangers in public; affirmation of self-worth. Look at what people are choosing to read in view of others, and feel superior. To the man on the subway reading The DaVinci Code I say “Pfft! Read a real book!”; to the woman in the park reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo I say “You're about two years too late for that bandwagon. Good book though.”; to the poser carrying around On the Road I say “Fucking poser”. Nowadays I can’t tell if someone is reading Charles Dickens or Lauren Conrad and this concerns me. I imagine it’s how people felt in the 50s, worrying there were communists in their midst.
3. What happens if you drop that thing? Does it shatter like so many broken dreams? What if it falls in a puddle? You’re screwed then, I bet. And before you start, I know that books can fall victim to similar fates. Most of them can bounce back from it, but not always. I once dropped a copy of Stephen King’s It into a pool. I tried to salvage it, letting it dry in the sun for days. Unfortunately, it swelled to twice its thousand-page-plus size and was unmanageable at best. But you know what? That book cost me twenty-five goddamn cents at a garage sale. Not a huge deal.
2. Lending! I heart introducing a friend to an awesome book. To know one book has passed through so many hands, delighting people along the way. I imagine you can connect two e-readers and download “books” back and forth, but is that really the same? Will you read that book and think about the person who gave it to you? I think not.
1. A book you love should be scarred with that love. I’ve read some of my favourite books so many times that they are literally falling apart. My Great Expectations actually did fall apart! There is nothing like holding a beat up old book in your hands, the edges of the dog-eared pages softened with years of turning; the spine cracked open to your favourite parts; the cover battered from years of being shoved into bags, tossed onto a beach towel, left in the sun, dropped on the subway. An e-reader will never, ever be as endearing or mean as much lying on your bedside table as a book you love. A book should look like this:
So, to sum up: Fuck you, e-readers.
