Allow me to step back in time half a decade or so, when a certain fear loomed large on the mind for those of us with a literary bent: the digitalization of the literary world. Bookstores were following the path of their video rental store brethren and being gutted to make way for Nordstrom Racks and mega-gyms. E-readers increasingly topped Christmas lists. Blogs were no longer the clunky, poorly designed online diaries of the early 2000s, but aesthetically pleasing, specialized platforms with scores of followers. Amazon was hailed as the savior of the book industry. The general population was reading again!

If you happen to be one of those who opened a brand new Kindle on Christmas morning, you’re aware of the massive battle that’s been underway, for years now, between publishers and the makers of e-readers like Amazon and Apple. You may have received three lovely, unexpected dollars as the result of a lawsuit settlement between Amazon and Hachette or some other tech giant/publisher dispute. The gist of it was that Amazon was selling e-books for far less than hardcovers, and the publishers’ primary tasks–getting physical books to bookstores and setting their own, rather high, prices–became obsolete, so the publishing houses were losing lots and lots of money. The full story is very complex and better handled by a more knowledgeable writer (you can read more about it in Keith Gessen’s “The War of the Worlds” in the most recent issue of Vanity Fair). I’d rather talk about a digitalization issue far more symbolic, possibly far less significant, and much closer to my heart.

Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re a book lover. And as a book lover, you likely own many well-worn, well-thumbed hard copies of your favorite books that have been read dozens of times over. Perhaps you’re an annotator or like to jump around when reading. Maybe you just can’t get enough of that new book smell. If so, you were likely outraged when the e-reader trend caught on.

But bear with me. I was one of you once. I refused to get a Kindle; it took away the entire soul of the act of reading. I scoffed at people who brought their iPads to the pool, who all seemed like they were reading exclusively things like Fifty Shades of Gray and Chelsea Handler’s new book. You don’t get the new book smell, you can’t annotate (let’s face it, the “pen” function on the iPad is an anti-dexterous joke), and flipping back and forth is so much more difficult than holding your place with your thumb that’s just not worth it. Additionally, crucially, books don’t have to be recharged, and in fact will survive most physical affronts save a fire, unlike their electronic equivalents.

I will still never throw out my old Count of Monte Cristo copy or the Pride and Prejudice my grandfather gave me, but I’ve learned to appreciate their digital counterparts as well. The average paperback weighs almost a pound. As a college student who travels a lot, it’s simply not feasible for me to carry physical books with me on trips. Owning a Kindle means I always have an entire library at my fingertips, and in fact I think it’s led me to read more new books and better acquaint myself with familiar ones because of the lack of physical limitations. And isn’t that the heart of the matter for us literary-minded folk? As long as people are interacting with, learning from, and generally bettering their lives from the material, is the vehicle so important in the long run? The words are what really matter, no matter how they’re printed–right?

To take the issue to even closer to home, Shenandoah itself, along with a host of other literary magazines, switched from hardcover to online fairly recently. This has complicated matters of layout and aesthetics, elements that can be critical to the essence of a literary journal. And of course, like with the publishers vs. Amazon debacle, there are financial matters to consider. But it certainly does make the magazine more accessible, more visible to the fair-weather reader who may now be more likely to become a committed reader because of the greater ease of accessibility.

I know this is an old debate, but it seems to me it might be interesting to check back in now that the dust has settled and see if any of the die-hard traditionalists have changed their minds. So, readers–has digitalization in fact taken away the “soul” of the literary world, or does the sacrifice of being able to physically handle the words make them that much stronger and far-reaching? How best can publishers, authors, editors, and readers maintain the personal connection felt with a beloved copy of a favorite book with its digital equivalent?

In celebration of the recent release of the book-cum-movie Gone Girl, I’d like to join the antagonist of that story in lamenting one of literature’s most irritating clichés: the quirky girl. Beach read though the book is, and psychopathic though Amy the Antagonist may be, her character offers an impressively well constructed perspective on the heroine that we, as readers, have come to take for granted. In Gone Girl, Amy launches a complex and twisted revenge plot in order to get back at her husband, who she feels has forced her to pretend to be the beloved “cool” girl for years in order to keep up with his unrealistic standards. Amy argues that this girl that men everywhere lust after doesn’t exist. I have to agree.

Contemporary popular literature is littered with her. The first time you see her, she’s nothing special–a little odd-looking, even. But after a few weeks or months of getting to know her you realize she’s the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen and she doesn’t even know it. She’s always doing something crazy and irresponsible: jumping into strangers’ pools fully clothed, adopting five puppies at once, and yet her life never seems to truly suffer from her reckless, adolescent behavior. She can hang with the guys but you would never call her masculine. She has an endearing and unusual hobby, like making coffee tables out of bottle caps or watching foreign films from the 1940s. She’s attractive, smart, funny, and interesting, yet somehow she’s still shy in social situations and thus has been dubbed “the weird girl” by her peers, but you know better. You fall in love with her suddenly, you never saw it coming, but the readership knew from the very first paragraph.

Literature’s quirky girl is closely related to the “manic pixie dream girl” of the movies, a term coined by film critic Nathan Rabin: “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” (Think Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer.) The manic pixie dream girl exists to teach the male protagonist to be himself and break loose from life’s rigid structures, a duty often undertaken by the quirky girl, although occasionally the gender roles are reversed in her case. Some perfect male specimen glimpses the beauty behind the quiet and convinces her to embrace her quirks for all the world to see.

The primary difference between the dream girl and the quirky girl lies in the latter’s–excuse the pun–bookishness. The dream girl tends to be frothy and feminine, while the quirky girl is smarter, more reclusive, with occasional dark flashes in her character. This tinge to her personality tricks the reader into thinking she may prove to be more complex than she is, but inevitably, the reader is disappointed. We need look no further than the bestseller lists of the past decade or so to see the evidence: Bella in Twilight; Anastasia in Fifty Shades of Gray; Sam in The Perks of Being a Wallflower; and so on. Although she has saturated the bookshelves more recently, the quirky girl is no new phenomenon. We saw her in Salinger’s genius-quirk girl Franny Glass and Harper Lee’s grit-quirk girl Scout.

My problem with the quirky girl is that authors insist on painting her as improbably awkward, shy, or insecure. If a girl possessing her amazingly diverse array of attributes existed, she would almost certainly not have such crippling social anxiety and lack of friends. And if we’re to believe that she really is somehow socially isolated or “different,” then let’s see a character who actually is kind of weird. She can still be charming and pretty and quirky and be a real human being with unsettling flaws as well: see Maura in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. The quirky girl is flat, dimensionless; her flaws, if any, are minor and easily forgivable, even loveable. (“Quirk” and “flaw” are not synonyms.) She is beyond, at least for me, the willingness to suspend disbelief.

What do you think, readers? Is my interpretation of the quirky girl too harsh or generalized? Does she play a more important role than I realize? Most importantly: do we think she’s here to stay?