i am waiting for the cloth version

A couple of days ago Finn had his first sit-down on his own with a book. It was a cloth number called "Fluffy Chick & Friends". (I would have taken a picture but our camera is missing. I know! Everybody send vibes that we'll find our camera. You know, find-y vibes.) It was so great! He was crinkling the crinkle business on the front cover, grabbing the pages in his little be-mittened hands and waving them back and forth.

And then I thought about cloth books, and went off on an imaginary tangent. See, I don't have a lot of time to read these days. While I was breastfeeding Finn the other day, "Fluffy Chick & Friends" was lying on the couch next to me, and since there was no grown-up reading material at arm's length, I grabbed it and read it.

The blah blah horse is in the stable. Give her a wave (or something), her name is Mabel.

I imagined some old friend coming up to me, maybe at the reunion, and asking me what I've been reading lately. And I imagined replying, "Oh, well, I'm been, um, sort of into cloth books? Um....let's see....I just read 'The Big Moose'...and that was pretty crinkly...there's a goat in it whose horns were sort of vinyl and pointy and you could grab them, so...yeah, um, it's got a lot of good textures, you might give that one a read...."

Texture is something that just gets left behind in adult literature*! And I think that should change. I'd love, say, a cloth version of Anna Karenina, where there could be interludes with different textures for various parts of the story.

*I speak not of porn, freaks.

****Anna Karenina Spoiler Alert, because I ran these ideas past Dave and he was like, I was going to read that.....******************

It could be like:

Feel Anna Karenina's black dress!
(and then you pat it with your big fat hand and you're like, oh, velvety.)

This is the wheat that Levin is growing!
(Stalky...wheaty....I can feel it with my fingers.)

Feel the icy indifference as it increases in Vronsky's heart towards Anna!
(Oh...it's cold...and hard...I can poke his little heart...(stroke, stroke)...it feels cold on my hand.)

Here's a puff of steam from the train that Anna throws herself under. Feel the steam!
(.....feels poufy.....)

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I think that this is an idea whose time has come. And I'd like to hear some of your ideas for the textures we can enjoy from famous books when the cloth versions come out.