KINDLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, for Christmas, my brother gave me a Kindle, which, quite frankly, might be the awesomest gizmo that I've had in a long, long time. We're talking iPod-esque in the geeky bliss that it gives me.

You see, I have this ridiculous addiction to buying books -- I go to bookstores, browse for half a day, buy two books, and then only read one. I do this over and over, in part because I think I'll get to that other book eventually and that owning it will encourage me to read it, and because I'm obsessed with showing off that I read whenever company comes over. I mean really, don't you secretly scan the bookshelves whenever you go to someone's house or apartment? And even though you "claim" that you are just seeing if you've read anything in common, you're really judging their taste and intellect.

Well, so along with this terribly expensive habit is the fact that I'm always reading about 3 to 5 books at one time. I'm just unable to read a book from beginning to end without wondering what else I might be missing. So the Kindle is PERFECTION for me (other than the whole making book-buying available wherever I go -- it's like giving a smoker a magically-refilling-cigarette pack).

There's a lot of hubbub about the death of the printed page because of this whole e-reader thing, and I get that. But I actually think that the move to electronic books is both necessary and good. For example, it obviously helps lower the entrance barrier for new writers trying to break into the industry. It also will help save paper (really, as much as I like Harry Potter, I'm pretty sure that the number of trees that had to die to allow the world to know what would become of Harry et al might be more horrifying than the way than the way Crabbe died -- seriously, think about how J.K. killed off that dude). But most importantly, I don't like this whole "out-of-print" thing that happens with old books. There's a whole bunch of good crap out there that have since fallen out of popularity, but still deserve to be read once in a while. And as the archives of literature inevitably continues to overflow, we need to be able to keep that stuff around. It only makes sense that e-reading should eventually become the norm.

Yes, I like the smell of books, the feel of real pages, and the overwhelming sense of self-importance that I get when I read snooty literary fiction out in public (oh man, I needed a second seat on the bus just for my ego when I was reading The Age of Innocence), but even I think that the Kindle is where it's at. True story.