Counterbalance

Jonathan Evison + Skylight Books = Be There or Seriously Miss Out

Jonathan Evison will be reading from West of Here this evening at the fantastic indie bookstore Skylight Books.

If his reading is as raucous and fun as his previous appearance at Skylight for All About Lulu, this is an evening you really shouldn't miss if you're anywhere close to LA tonight. That sounds like a tall order, but, well. Swanky pub dinners have been cancelled for this.

So. You know. It's probably not something you'll want to have missed. Especially when you get home from whatever else you chose to do instead and you scan through all the tweets from the night and come to the realization that you miscalculated in some egregious way that can't be undone. (Though it sort of could because he's reading tomorrow night at Book Soup.)

I might be overselling it. But you get my point.

See you there?

LAT Names Book Prize Finalists I've Never Heard Of. Again.

For the umpteenth year in a row, the LA Times has nominated book prize finalists that I've never heard of. Ever. In a world of so many prizes with long lists then short lists that have so many familiar names and so many obvious outcomes, I can't sort out if I'm intrigued that I don't recognize many of these author names & book titles or if I'm unimpressed with the proceedings. I suspect it's the former. That's a good thing, no?

You can read the full list of nominees over at Jacket Copy, but I'm primarily interested in three categories and have noted with an obnoxious "*" the books I'd not heard of until this moment so that you may guffaw and roll your eyes at how alarming it is or how embarassing it is that I'd openly admit to not knowing about them:

Borders Hoarders and My Indie Haul

In light of the Borders bankruptcy news, I made my way to the Pasadena location yesterday for their "20% off all books" closing sale. The lines were long and were filled with would-be readers whose arms were full of books. So full they could hardly hold them as they stood in line. Several had two brimming shopping baskets full of books. My first thought was: where were all of you before today? Is a magical 20% really enough to get you out of your homes and into the bookstore in droves? I was shocked. Why today and no other day in the many years of this bookstore being open? It is rarely crowded (save for the Seattle's Best cafe inside and on the occasional Cesar Millan book signing) so to see the store so full of people just as they are about to close for good was surprising and sad.

I set about finding a few books to purchase, but I lost my nerve. It could have been the lines. It could have been that I was hungry. Or it could have been that I was annoyed with all these people acting like they'd just discovered books for the first time. Or perhaps I was annoyed with Borders for thinking that such large stores (filled with yoga mats and stationary and other decidedly non-book things) were sustainable. I wanted to shout at the people in line, but that seemed misdirected and wouldn't have been appropriate, so I set my books down and headed for Vroman's, a great indie bookstore down the street.

I got a little caught up in making sure Vroman's stays open as long as possible and my haul is evidence of that:

• The Empty Family by Colm Toibin
• West of Here by Jonathan Evison
• What is All This?: Uncollected Stories by Stephen Dixon
• The Lost Art of Reading by David L. Ulin
• Tin House, Volume 12, Number 2
• Slake, Issue 2

Will I read all of these in the next two weeks? No. Could I have purchased most of them at Borders for 20% off cover price? Yes. So why didn't I? It's a good question and I don't know quite how to answer it other than to say that I really wanted to give Vroman's my money yesterday and so I did.

This hardly addresses my Kindle eBooks habit (though I often buy hard cover and digital copies of a book) but I've always tried to shop regularly at my local indies, digital books or not. (And yes, I'm considering an eReader switch so I can actually read the digital copies of books Vroman's offers.) If it's no longer novels that I buy (those are usually digital unless it's an author I adore and so buy hard copies in-store), I find I'm purchasing more art books, more cookbooks, more graphic novels than ever before. I'll continue to do so. Will you?

You Don't Have to Like It, But You Must Accept It

Though I'm still struggling to organize my thoughts on the Tools of Change conference that just ended, Eoin Purcell's post this morning about publishers accepting digital change and forging a future accordingly is about as spot-on as a #TOCCON wrap-up can be for someone who didn't attend #TOCCON. A taste:

Digital content WILL dominate the future*. You don’t have to like that, but you DO have to accept it. When you accept that you’ll begin to see that the systems behind publishing need to change rapidly or else you need to create a new organisation to work within the new rules (and economic realities).

It’s time for the industry to stop worrying about Apple, Amazon and Google. It is time for the industry to just forget about all of them and to decide how it is going to bring stories to readers in a way that keeps it relevant, interesting and hopefully profitable or else to decide that it is going to grow old and die gracefully. In either case, I’m pretty sure it’s time to shut up and do it.

It's well worth your time to read it whether you're on the don't like it/won't accept it side or drinking from the digital change firehose and loving it side.

Pondering Pollock

Say what you will about Jackson Pollock, love his work or hate it. Whichever way your art-appreciation wind blows, my immediate reaction when I see his paintings is to slow down and take time to make sense of all the disparate parts. I want to sit with a piece long enough so that the unfamiliar, incoherent, not entirely known elements become something that is...known. Understandable, even.

This image was taken at MoMA on Monday and it perfectly captures my current state as I think about the many excellent conversations at Book^2 Camp and the first days of the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference. I am pondering the vast interconnected landscape of what's possible and what's not. The world of who's whining, who's working, who's making a difference and who's not.

I'm also painfully aware that I need time and space (and quiet and no keynotes) to mull over many seemingly incoherent parts and find common throughlines that interest me and that I want to explore further. Back to back days of great discussions and panels and off-the-cuff brainstorming have left me very much in need of getting back to the Pollock room at MoMA. Sitting quietly on a bench. Undisturbed. Free to take all the time I need to let the cacophony sink in and find meaning in it.

The Instructions: Did You Like It?

It is now painfully clear that I've let the enthusiasm over this roundtable wane, but I will not abandon ship (as I lugged that book here to NY with me and damn if we're not going to get to the bottom of this!) and I'm confident we can collectively prevail.

So - we agreed that although I didn't map out a proper reading schedule (Scott runs a much more organized group read than I) or a planned grouping of topics to discuss, we'd start with: Did You Like It?

I'm nearly finished with it and I find that while I was at first skeptical, I then was very much liking it for a whole chunk of the middle and now I'm back to skeptical again. I can often read a plotless novel for hundreds of pages and enjoy it if the sentences are fantastic. Something about The Instructions, however, is leaving me anxious that I will have spent my time in vain, that there will be no payoff worth the 1,000 pages of my time. I'm usually not a reader who cares this much about payoff...so...that's something. Much as I enjoy living all the way down the rabbit-hole that is Gurion's mind (which was at first charming in a Nicholson Baker, minutae kind of way) I can't help but feel we need to get to the point in this novel. I keep thinking "let's move this along."

Yet, I suspect that not getting to the point is...the point of this novel.

There are also some problems for me with Gurion being too self-aware of how his wiritng may appear to others and how his hyper self-awareness raises a question for me of Levin's own hyper-awareness and it feels a bit like an excuse. Sort of like Bolano's grand caveat in 2666 that ultimately was a big plea: "This isn't perfect, I know it, don't judge..."

I have many examples of Gurion's/Levin's voice that kept interrupting my flow, my total immersion in the novel. There were areas where Levin got so meta that I felt it was cutesy. Too cutesy. Almost whiny. But I won't get into all that now...there's plenty of time for all of that.

In answer to the question "Did You Like It?" and as a way to kick off the discussion, I can simply say that the jury is out for me whereas a few weeks ago, I was very much on the side of yes. You?

Lit Bits and A Bit About Indies in a Digital Age

Per my social voting --> social reading post, I think the shift in digital reading can mean big things for our indie brick & mortar bookstores if they're hip to what's going on and can find inventive ways to engage hyperlocally in their communities to foster more reading. This seems to be a trend as others are writing about it in a way they weren't even a few months ago. Does that mean I'm on to something or...?:

• Is There Hope for Small Bookstores in a Digital Age? - a primer of sorts from USA Today
• Bookstores Now, More Than Ever - a more considered look at the matter from Kassia at Booksquare
• Books: Onward to the Digital Revolution -a look at John B. Thompson's Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century that includes this money quote: "What if digital technology spawns a radically new mode of distribution with few of the present industry’s fixed costs, one that delivers content in both physical and e-book form directly to readers wherever they may be."

In other bookish news:

• More Bolano is coming soon. In serial form. In the Paris Review.
• Kindle's Collective Highlights can now be made public - I have oh so much to say on this as you might imagine from my previous Kindle Highlights ponderings, so I'll have my thoughts sorted on this soon.
• ...but not before I have my thoughts sorted on my died-before-it-got-going Roundtable on The Instructions. I'll start-off with a first post...tomorrow. Really. (For the four of you still waiting for the blessed day to come, I thank you immeasurably for your patience. I have my learned my lesson about planning Roundtables during the busiest work time of the year. But I got us to read it, right? That's certainly 70% of this particular battle, no?)

Can Social Voting Lead to Social Reading?

Last November, our nation voted. Foursquare developed a very cool interactive graphic (thanks to the constantly fabulous work of JESS3) that offered a real-time look at Foursquare check-ins at polling stations across the country throughout the day.

I know this was months ago, but I can't stop thinking about its implications for reading.

I screengrabbed the site throughout the day, sure that by November 3rd I'd have a brilliant solution for how something like the Foursquare social voting site could lead naturally into a real-time view of what people are reading all over the country. You'll notice it's February 2nd and I'm no closer to a big fancy answer.

I know we have lots of book sales data. There are devices that can share this data as well as what-we're-reading-in-the-moment data (and do), there are online reading communities like Goodreads that help us connect with others reading the same books we're reading. Heck, I bet Goodreads could make some gorgeously trussed up JESS3 maps with all the data they have about who is reading what at any given moment. I know all of this. I use all of this (sporadically, I'll confess) and I'm still thinking about the Foursquare election day map.

Why?