Last night the little angel walked into the restaurant with confidence until she saw her cousin and his friend, man-sized. Immediately she clung to my leg and hid behind me. We tried to engage her in conversation, but she crawled into my lap and hid her head, staying like that through most of  the meal, despite my nephew and his friend smiling at her.

After dinner, they all went off to play video games, and she began to relax. When we walked into the house, she wanted to serve them Oreos. I handed her the bag, and she walked back into the kitchen moments later. "They each took one," she whispered, eyes shining.

By bedtime, I could barely rip her away from watching them play Wii.  "Please," she begged. "Can't I stay up just a little longer?"

I understood. I remember wanting attention so badly from my older cousins, especially the boys, wanting that validation from someone who was family and would thus likely be nice to me but not so close family that they knew what I had for breakfast. I remember my older cousins coming to visit from California, my girl cousin doing our little-girl hair and letting us try on her mascara and jangly silver bracelets before trotting off to the local pool to amaze the locals with her tanned, California bikini body.  I remember my boy cousins shooting BB guns at squirrels and driving tractors and thrashing around in the cornfields, telling us there were SNAKES and COYOTES and all sorts of vermin that would EAT US and that still terrify me when I get within ten paces of corn taller than my head (which happens more frequently than you would think). I remember wanting them to think I was cool, that I was pretty, that I was smart, that I was worthy of their time and conversation. They came so infrequently it was like magic descending on us when they arrived for a few weeks every summer, like Peter Pan and Tinkerbell and Johnny Depp all wrapped up in one family, leaving just before we could quite figure them out.

When I tucked the little angel in, she whispered to me, "I had fun." And I knew she'd received what she needed from her big cousin.

My oldest nephew and his buddy are staying with us tonight, passing through Kansas City on a trip up north. He's in college now, which seems insane to me, since I met him when he was eight or nine. In my mind's eye, he's still playing pick-up baseball in my parents-in-law's back yard, serving as the DH for five toddlers.

I told the little angel her cousin was going to be staying with us yesterday. She wondered if he might be interested in seeing the paper crabs we made this weekend while it was rainy. (They are resting on a beach made of yellow scrap fabric we picked up at a sewing store while researching fabulous new outfits for her fabric fashion-plate toy.)  Which brought me to thinking about putting up my nephew's buddy in the little angel's playroom. I wondered how he would feel cuddling up on an aerobed surrounded by princesses, baby dolls and plastic food.

Boys. I just know nothing about 'em. But I can't wait to see my nephew.

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In a twist of fate (because I didn't know my nephew was coming to stay with us until this weekend and I wrote this post weeks ago), I have a post on BlogHer today about being an aunt.

There have been a lot of literary elitists complaining publicly about Kindle. They're not mad that it's expensive. They're not mad that its screen is hard to read. They're mad nobody can tell what they're reading by looking.

From the New York Times:

The practice of judging people by the covers of their books is old and time-honored. And the Kindle, which looks kind of like a giant white calculator, is the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper. If people jettison their book collections or stop buying new volumes, it will grow increasingly hard to form snap opinions about them by wandering casually into their living rooms.

From Vanity Fair:

To be fair, both writers go on to say some important things about identity and possessions and the values we attach therein, but this is Campaign to Link Print Publishing, so you'll have to go read the rest for yourselves.

I love to display books. We have two floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in our living room and six in our library. My daughter has two bookshelves taking up half of one of her walls, and she only has picture books. I totally get the pride one takes in displaying a collection built over years. The intermingling of my Ray Bradbury with my husband's Dick Schaap is a visual symbol of our ongoing union that I take very seriously.

But I've read my books. They're not just for show. My display, if you will, is not every book I've ever read, but rather all the books I saw fit to keep. My favorites. I've been reading voraciously since I could read -- if I kept them all, I'd end up on Dr. Phil as one of those pack-rat women in danger of death by stacks. 

Even if I got a Kindle (which I am so totally saving up to do), I'd use it for the to-read queue and keep my favorites on my shelves. If I liked a new book, I'd buy it in hard copy and add it to the collection. I see the Kindle as a sampling tool, allowing you to worship a writer's entire catalog and purchase in bound form only those you see fit to display and lug around to impress New York writers on the subway.

Buying a book on the Kindle is so easy I believe it will make it easier for new writers to get in front of readers, and it will definitely make it easier for readers like me who, once they discover a writer whose work they love, will read every published word that author ever wrote.  (And you won't have to make the mistake of buying, say, everything Joseph Heller ever wrote, only to find his genius was entirely poured into Catch-22.)

Kindle will allow us a deeper relationship with our favorite writers. It will make them more accessible. It will render the concept of going out of print meaningless. It will allow books to truly live on forever, as the expense of keeping them on the shelves will disappear.

I love books, don't get me wrong. But what I really love is writing. I want the words, whatever form they come in. Whether or not someone can physically see that I've read Lady Chatterley's Lover, I still caught the obscure literary reference on Six Feet Under. (And I loved that show's writers even more.)  The books live on in your head long after you've read them. The right book will forever change the way you see the world. I've been haunted by stories for years, especially when I see them starting to come true in our age of reality television. Nobody can take your books away from you once they meld with your subconscious, forever shaping your worldview and interfering with your ability to see Survivor as harmless fun.

As far as peering across the subway to judge a person by what they're reading -- I'm more likely to breathe a sigh of relief if they're reading ANYTHING. I'm not pretending I'm not a literary snob, because I so totally am. I don't need to see the cover, though. I'm not going to bemoan the Kindle and iPod because they interfere with our ability to judge a person by their book's cover. Instead, I breathe a sigh of relief I, as a writer, live in an era when it's becoming easier and easier to share my words. 

Kindles and iPods are making it easier for the little guys, inviting the democratization of publishing. Will that result in more crappy writing making it into the marketplace?  Yes! But it will also result in more previously unheard and less-connected voices finding readers.

And then we'll buy their books and place them on our bookshelves. Which will be richer and more diverse than they ever could've been if we relied only on bookstores to discover authors.