This weekend was the L.A. Times Book Festival, which featured dozens of panels, hundreds of authors and the University of Nebraska Press’s own Gabrielle Burton, author of Searching for Tamsen Donner. Burton was on a panel titled Memory: The Bigger Picture, an appropriate topic as Searching for Tamsen Donner recalls a life-changing trip Burton took with her husband and five daughters more than 30 years ago, during which they retraced the route of the Donner Party. The LA Times has a rundown on many of the other panels at the event, which included discussions about writerly guilt, the writer’s ear and regional fiction, on its blog.

Here in Nebraska, the weather wasn’t nearly as nice as it reportedly was for the LA Times Book Festival. I spent a lot of the weekend indoors, wrapped up in a blanket, reading, and that’s what I was doing when I stumbled across this article in the New York Times. The story asks whether the Kindle is off-putting to literary super snobs because there’s no book cover, and therefore, no one is going to know what very important, very inaccessible text the reader is reading (except, of course, for the reader himself). The Times points out that people who drop hundreds of dollars on an e-reader probably didn’t buy it just for, say, the Twilight series, and that those who observe someone with a Kindle one the subway probably realize that.

That’s it for this morning. Hope your week is off to a great start!