Counterbalance

{Insert Big Idea to Save Books & Reading & Literacy Here}

I have spent most of my life reading and writing. I've spent my entire professional life working at digital agencies. There is a congruence here that I've tried very hard, for most of my life, to ignore. Or keep at bay. I'd felt for so long that my marketing strategy, digital agency life had so little to do with my writerly, readerly, let's study meta-themes and discuss Proust until we're blue in the face life that I worked overtime to keep them separate. 

I was wrong.

They are inextricably linked (most notably because both parts exist within me and it's been hell trying to keep the two separate all these years) now because of the ever-shifting world of publishing in the age of digital. I can't tell you what a relief it is to see that external forces now match my interior state. I can now set aside my George Costanza-esque need to keep my agency friends separate from my literary friends. To keep my thoughts on marketing authors quiet, my desire to develop "social reading" tech solutions unknown, my obsession with geolocation and the impact it might have on hyper-local reading patterns a secret. I can finally talk about books with my tech friends and marketing strategy with my publisher friends and no one gives me crazy looks. I'm freeeeee....

However.

The road ahead for authors and publishers and readers and booksellers and libraries and kids who can't read has gotten better and murkier and worse and clearer all at once. There are so many tools and communities and technologies that have furthered the cause of reading and have extended the reach of independent publishers and their authors. Yet, these are also difficult times for authors to get paid what they deserve, digital rights management being what it is, big publishers being who they are, the structure being what it is. You know the drill.

I haven't been able to absorb it all and make sense of it yet. None of the big, lofty ideas swirling in my head over the past few months have coalesced into anything tangible, into anything valuable that will solve these problems or even some of them or even one of them. But at the beginning of every day and at the end of each long night...this is the big problem I come back to. This is one of the big ideas I want to meditate on, tease apart, figure out.

Call me idealistic, call me crazy, call me whatever you will: I believe reading changes lives and perspectives and prejudices and communities and nation's futures. I believe everyone has a right to learn how to read and I believe everyone should have access to every book they desire so they can dream big and change the world they live in...whether that's a room away, a street away, a block away, a town away, a country away, a world away. 

I don't yet know what the solutions look like to these problems and I know I'm not the only one who wants to solve them. What I do know is this: I am now certain that part of the reason I'm here is to help figure this out in whatever capacity I'm able, in whatever way I'm needed.

My big fancy dream is to find a way to have all this brilliant technology and the social web (and whatever else we've yet to discover and coin) do the one thing I care about most: get more people to read. Who's with me?

Post de Zoet Waffling

Vacillation
I have finished David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

As with any Mitchell novel, it is a bummer when it ends. There won't be another for awhile.

I hate historical novels. I'm not really into war craft and ships and munitions and copper trading and bookkeeping. But I was into all of that in this novel. All of it. What does this tell you about Mitchell's storytelling prowess?

I was less into the Atwood-esque impregnate-nuns-against-their-will at the convent situation. And the ninja-style attempt to rescue them.

The other stuff was so good. Why add on to it?

The writing was so beautiful in parts it hurt. Literally hurt. 

But that convent-baby stuff was really killing my vibe.

Who can do what Mitchell has done? Each novel is entirely different in tone, in structure, in subject matter. It is mind-blowingly impressive and I adore him for it.

But...the baby stuff? It took me so far out of the story, so out of everything that was mesmerizing and fast-paced and oh-my-goodness-what-will-happen-next. It was not needed.

That British/Dutch/de Zoet not backing down stuff at the end was nuts. Brilliant the way you kept hoping that one thing (you know, with the 200 boats and the sails down and the maybe fire situation?) would actually materialize but it didn't and the anticipation of that was masterful storytelling. I fell for all of it. I loved every minute of falling for it. 

I even got all wrapped up in the do the right thing meme. I was rooting for small countries and republics and good people to prevail. I never go for that stuff, but I did. 

But. Yeah. That weirdo interlude at the convent distracted me something awful. And I still don't really even get it. Where did all the babies go? Huh?

Summation
It was not a perfect novel for me. I purposely did not read any reviews prior to reading the novel. I will do so now and will probably find that I'm the lone ass who simply didn't "get it" and that this is the most perfect novel ever written. I'm okay with that. It jumped all over the place, was disjointed, tried too hard to be filmic and other weird stuff I can't quite pin down just yet. I know Cloud Atlas was like that but...it had to be. That was the point of the story. Jacob de Zoet, on the other hand, was linear narrative that jumped and cut too much for me. The jump cuts didn't add to the storytelling for me, they distracted.I kept thinking "Oh look what he's doing there, he's taking us back to the crazy baby convent place...hopefully this will be brief so we can cut back to the story. Oh look, here we go..." Maybe I'm getting old.

As for Mitchell? I'll read whatever that man writes. Period. He's that good. 

LA Events You Shouldn't Miss Tonight (though I will...)

There are two fantastic bookish events that I can't attend in LA tonight because I'll be in four hours of canine CPR class. Yes, folks, you read that right. Though I'm intent on solving many bookish/literacy/lets get more people to read problems, I'm also a founder at Walk Fido and literally being able to save doggie lives comes with the territory. But just because I'll be doing mouth-to-mouth with some lovely pits, doesn't mean you should miss out on two fantastic bookish events tonight:

• Slake Magazine Launch Party at Skylight Books, 5pm - All-Star cast of writers reading from the first issue include Mark Z. Danielewski, Jonathan Gold, Michelle Huneven & David Schneider. Crazy good, right? I suspect that's why the searches to the blog for the past few weeks have been all about Danielewski and that interview I did way back when. I'm very bummed to be missing this, even if it is to save dog lives, so I implore you to go if you can. If you can't make it out to the event at Skylight tonight, read the interview, then go get a copy of Slake. I can't wait to read it.
  
• Suzanne Rivecca Reading, 7pm - As I mentioned Friday, the fantastic Suzanne Rivecca is reading tonight at The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery Barnsdall Art Park at 7pm and you should get the heck out there and see her. I'm mortified that I can't go, so you should really be there in my stead. Also, read her LAist interview & leave a comment on my Friday post to win a copy of her short story collection. Nary a soul has left a comment, so...um...your chances of winning are brilliant.

If you get a chance to attend either event or both, let me know. Would love to get your thoughts. 

Suzanne Rivecca Does LAist

As you know, I'm a fan of Rivecca's debut short story collection Death is Not an Option. I had a chance to exchange some email questions with her and the result is up at LAist now - go check it out. Here's a sneak peek:

Your short story collection explores a very specific emotional territory. Each character has an interesting journey from the lies they've been telling themselves to an arrival at emotional honesty. An arrival at seeing themselves and others for who they really are and what that means for their future. This is something that folks often take years of therapy to fully recognize and own. Yet, in these stories, we are seeing characters at that exact moment of realization, at the precise point in their lives where this shift occurs. What about this shift, this moment of realization, interests you?

I'm intrigued by how, more often than not, those "a-ha" moments are fleeting, just momentary flashes of grace, and people don't really recognize or feel their impact until years later. In most of my stories, that shift is too much for the characters to process and they aren't able to translate it into action.  But that moment of standing at the precipice of some huge and potentially disturbing mystery is one of the most ennobling moments I can think of. It's like standing in front of a burning bush. In that light, we are all fleetingly burnished with meaning. 

Rivecca will be reading on Sunday at 7pm at The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery Barnsdall Art Park as part of The New Short Fiction Series.

Haven't yet picked up her debut collection and won't be able to see in her in LA? You are in luck. I'm giving away my hardcover copy of her book to one lucky reader. Leave your "entry" in the comments and tell me why you'd love to have this collection sent your way. A randomly-selected winner will be announced on Monday so get your comments in by midnight PST on Sunday & spread the word - or don't, if you want to be selfish like that!

If you're in LA, come on out to the reading Sunday to support a great writer! Be there or...

Reader-Writer Moment #473

In the fraught-with-fear space between Vida's last novel and the moments when I will take up Mitchell's latest, I've been reading Sloane Crosley's latest. I'm also freshly back from a trip to New York. A trip that required me to regale my traveling companions (longtime NYC dwellers among them) with tales of crazy taxi life & death situations. Why? Because this last trip involved even crazier taxi life & death situations that required the telling of previous ones to provide some sort of context, a barometer for the new level of craziness just-experienced. 

When I say "life & death" I'm not being novelistically dramatic. I've been in cabs that hit cyclists. I've witnessed drivers in head-on collisions. I've been called many things en route to Manhattan from JFK. I've been shouted at, asked to get out, begged to be let out and many variants in between. On this recent trip, I had the once in a lifetime (hopefully) fun of being in a taxi that was playing a rousing group game with another cab of let's cut each other off all the way down 9th Ave. no matter how many times my passenger's faces almost hit the front of the in-cab television or how many cars we sideswipe along the way. It was very bad. So bad we begged to be let out and weren't. For many swervy blocks.There were also smells. So. Many.

I'm a fan of humor in writing & Crosley's How Did You Get This Number does not disappoint. Her humor, my current in-between Vida/Mitchell state, and my recent return from NYC made Crosley's diatribe on taxi fun a delicious reader-writer moment:

"But there is no escaping the concoction of armpit and cheese rot currently molesting your face. Your mind does a quick calculation, multiplying the degree of stank by the distance between here and your destination, dividing the whole thing by your fear of overreacting. The idea that you might offend the driver is irrelevant. If he's going to tool around this town in an air bubble of poop, he should know there are consequences."

 

"The moment you shut the cab door, you can be who you want to be. If you are normally loath to make demands, you are now free to raise definitive questions: Why this route? Can you avoid Times Square? Can you please identify this sticky substance? How in the name of all that is holy can you not smell that? If you are a gregarious sort of person, you can finally have ten minutes of absolute silence in the presence of another human being without anyone asking you what's wrong. If you spend your day making decisions, you can stop, releasing yourself with those magic words: Whichever way's the fastest. Repeat it again when your driver attempts to brainstorm with you. He could tell you that the West Side Highway is closed and he'll need to swing around the moon first. Really. Whichever way."

There's more goodness in Crosley's latest collection of essays, including the complete taxi riff. I'll be finishing it up over the next few days before I take on the looming-large Mitchell novel.

Books You Wanted to Love

I've not yet begun David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet because, frankly, I'm worried I won't like it. I've liked everything Mitchell has ever written (and that's not just because I'm a crazy Mitchell fangirl), but I've also liked everything Vendela Vida has ever written. Until now.

Which is why I'm worried about Mitchell's latest.

I wanted to love The Lovers in the way that I loved Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. But I didn't love The Lovers. I didn't even like it. There were a few sections where I was into the world Vida created, rooting for the characters. So there's that. Yet upon finishing the book I thought, so what? What was the point of all this? I felt nothing but a vague sense of how many ways this book could have been amazing and wasn't. What also nearly broke my heart was that the gorgeously taut language and precision-prose I've come to love Vida for were nearly absent from this book. 

You know me. I rarely write about books I don't like because, what's the point? There are plenty of people paid terrible wages that are happy to slam book after book. It's not really my ilk and as goody two-shoes as it seems, I'd rather focus my time (and your attention) on books that I loved because every book and every good writer needs as much love as they can get in these tumultuous-for-books times.

So why am I bashing a not-liked book of a much-loved writer? Because it got me thinking. We all have books we wanted to love but didn't. We all follow every move of much-loved writers even though their last book (or three) left us wanting, confused, or just plain meh. What is that book for you? That book you wanted so much to love but with every page began to realize you weren't loving it and were, perhaps, hating it? 

Here's to hoping that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet isn't another one of those for me.