My Kindle makes me feel like Rory Gilmore. There’s that episode where she’s bemoaning her backpack for being too miniscule for her library of books, it’s bursting at the seams. On top of her school books, she’s packed Millay’s biography, Vidal’s essays, a Faulkner novel and Eudora Welty’s short stories, for whichever mood might suddenly seize her.

Rory: “No, the Millay is a biography, and sometimes if I’m on the bus and I pull out a biography and I think to myself, ‘Well, I don’t really feel like reading about a person’s life right now’ then I’ll switch to the novel, and then sometimes if I’m not into the novel, then I’ll switch back.”
Lorelai: “Hold on. What is the Gore Vidal?”
Rory: “Oh, that’s my lunch book.”

[S02E07 Like Mother Like Daughter]

With an e-book reader, I find myself switching between books like I’m switching between channels. I’m kind of the same with real books, I can be halfway through one when I’ll start another – then another, using the second as a bookmark for the first etc. until I start closing them out in reverse order, like parentheses. But what would Rory do? Here’s my hypothetical…

I’m envisaging some well-meaning family friend – let’s say Babette – receives a Kindle as a gift and since the old broad doesn’t read so good any more, she gives it to Lorelai to pass onto Rory (who now lives in New York) because everyone knows Rory’s an eternal bookaholic. Initially repulsed by the thing because it doesn’t smell like a book, you can’t flick to a spot you remember, you can’t personalise it or lend it or accidentally spill coffee on it, Rory intends to re-gift it but it stays on the credenza until one day she’s in a rush, doesn’t have anything to read and grabs it on the way out, as a last resort. She comes home that night (to Jess, who now wears thick-rimmed black glasses while he types magazine articles and occasional novels on a second-hand typewriter at a second-hand wooden desk in their cosy low-ceilinged New York loft apartment) and she’s converted – no, she’s evangelistic.

She tells him while riding the subway she bought twenty books out of thin air, another twenty while sitting in the park at lunchtime and six more on a bathroom break. She’s now impossibly carrying fifty NEW books in her beat-up Birkin bag and doing a happy dance in her head – she can type notes into the book and they’re synchronised online and she only has to remember to charge the thing every couple of weeks. She’s got the Kindle Keyboard 3G so she can surf or check her e-mail in an emergency or buy more books, anywhere in the world, for free. It’s basically the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Jess peers over his glasses, looking something between sceptical and worried. He says if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – but as he puts on the coffee (using an old filter coffee maker he repaired from Luke’s), he’s just happy she’s happy. And later on he secretly gets his own and reads it in the closet.

I get the feeling an e-book wouldn’t solve her capacity problems, because she’d carry it in addition to her other books, because sometimes she’d be in the mood for the feel of paper and the weight of a book and there are those books that aren’t e-available yet – but I think she’d make a niche for an e-book due to the realisation that with all its plus points and non-book points, the absolute best thing about a Kindle is when you have a good book on it. A good book is a good book. (Conversely, when I get a couple of bad books in a row, I tend to blame the device and go back to real books for a while).

Do you think Rory’d love her Kindle? It’s gotta be a lighter way to attempt Rory Gilmore’s Book List Challenge. Did Gilmore Girls ever inspire you to read anything?