in which i sing the praises of Star Wars and posit an interesting question

Happy Friday to all! I'm pretty stoked and not just because it's Friday (besides, when you work from home, Friday is pretty much just another day...). Anywho, WHY am I so super excited about this particular Friday?!? I'm glad you asked (you did ask, didn't you?). My husband, awesome, groovy fellow that he is, bought us last minute tickets to see the Atl. Braves (hopefully) destroy my least favorite baseball team of all time (*cough* the mets *cough*) and...AND...tonight, at Turner Field, is...wait for it... STAR WARS NIGHT!!!! (*cue epic John Williams music NOW*) I'll be getting my nerd on AND enjoying a baseball game in this lovely fall weather! I am now going to attempt to stop dancing around the room humming the Imperial March long enough to finish this post. The Office of Letters and Light-those splendiferous people who go to painstaking and outlandish limits to bring us NaNoWriMo every November- posited a very interesting question on their blog the other day. It appears there is a new feature for the Kindle in beta-testing which will allow readers to highlight passages on their e-books and ask the author questions regarding that passage. Hmmm, says I. Sounds kind of neat. I could send Neil Gaiman (*swoon*) a message about Danse Macabre or J.K. Rowling a question about The Half Blood Prince. However, and this is where the post gets interesting, the author of the blog asks: Will this feature take away from the reader's experience and, in her words, "demote (the readers) interpretation to a thing of lesser importance?" This got me thinking. We all read passages in books that leave us scratching our heads, making funny faces at the pages and staying up waaaay past midnight contemplating the deeper meaning of said passage. Would I want to be in the middle of a story, have one of those moments hit me and pause to send the author a message? The connection factor between author and reader would skyrocket. But, and this is a big but, it seems to me it would not only detract from the experience of getting lost in a book, but it would take away the delicious mystery of reading. There will always be things we read in and put into our own novels that people aren't going to get. That's the joy of writing and reading. Mystery. Wonder. The joy of picking a book up after years of having read it and being able to contemplate something afresh, possibly entertaining a new angle. What are you thoughts on this? I'm just curious. I can see the pros and the cons of it. The author leaves us with this question to consider as well: what if we could ask questions of dead authors? I'll admit, THAT would be seriously cool and I'd totally jump on that bandwagon. I'd love to chat with Hemingway, L'Engle, Wilde and Poe. Which brings me to another, perhaps more profound question: are there e-books in the afterlife? Hmmm.... Happy Pondering!