Books Reading Tonight
posted by on April 11 at 10:06 AM
An open mic night and three readings for your entertainment if, like seemingly half the city, you’re too hungover to hit the clubs tonight.
Author Ridley Pearson is at the University Bookstore. He’s here with one of those young adult books written by an adult author. Besides the Chabon and the Alexie young adult novels, which are very good, most of these books scream “easy paycheck” to me. The facts that A) Person’s book is titled Steel Trap: The Challenge, obviously making it the first in a series; B) the book is published by Disney Press; and C) the main character is a named Steven “Steel” Trapp all point to this being a ginormous stinker.
Karen Joy Fowler is at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight. She’s the author of The Jane Austen Book Club, which I haven’t read, but which people have said is actually a pretty nice homage to Jane Austen. She’s in town with Wit’s End, which seems to be a novel about a bestselling mystery author’s relationship to the internet, specifically blogs, Wikipedia, and fanfic. I think this looks interesting, kind of, but then, I’m a book guy and this sort of thing is practically designed to interest me. Your level of interest may vary.
And at Town Hall, Darius Rejali, who is “one of the world’s leading experts on torture” according to press materials, reading from his new book Torture and Democracy. This is an important reading, and I highly recommend it because it should be thought-provoking. But, for just a moment, can we talk about the cover, which is up and to the left over there? It looks kind of like the cover you’d put on an anthology of erotic S&M stories, with its smooth back and weird sepia tones. And the font, too, seems oddly celebratory, or at least a lot…lighter…than the subject matter deserves. Or are they trying to attract general readers by toning down the content? Or is it just a poorly designed cover? If you go tonight, don’t ask Rejali; authors almost never have control over the covers of their books.
Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, can be found by clicking on the words at the end of this sentence.
Also, if you haven’t already, you should check out the pimpalicious books page, which has a ton more reviews and a mini-blog revue of the last week’s books-themed Slog posts.
Yeah, I've totally got to agree with you about the cover I completely thought it was an S&M fiction book not a non-fiction book about such heavy subject matter.
p.s. Pimpalicious?
None of my writer friends trying to crack YA market have kids themselves, which seems weird to me.
Karen Joy Fowler is awesome.
PopTart: I got sick of "nifty."
This is a most timely oportunity to attend this reading and consider the picture on the the front of this example.
For some this subject matter is one of the most distressing of events in the world;
in paticular, any and all people on the planet concerned with the over-reaching arm of influence and power of skeptisism, ridicule and dismissive contempt against the continuing disgrace of The Iraq War and Americas complicity in human rights abuses by the elected leaders of our country.
Far to many people have been desensitized and sheltered by idealism and frank disbelief that our Constitution and the freedoms that this countries inhabitants were born into and died for could or would ever be allowed to degenerate to the level of denial and ongoing retractions and re-classifications of public testimony and explanations for policy decision made in defense of obvious transgression of law and authority.
Today's story in the Seattle Times April 11th, 2008 page 1 and continued on A6:
'Cheney OK'd CIA's harsh tactics,
Says ex-official'
is further evidence of the calamity facing America as the supposed leader of the free world.
In contrast, the large type of the headline story front and center page of today's Seattle Times is worthy of further contemplation giving the state of tension in Aisa and the resposibility of America as a nation to not only honor our citizens and the traditions of our immigrants and heritage, but to rise above the failed lessons of previous mistakes made in history to further enlighten human beings to the real value of life on this planet....
and that I believe is the perpetuation of life, not the destruction countries and the individuals or populations of people determined by changeable policy review.
What America and it's citizens should be calling for today is the release of the October 2001 memo describing
"novel ways the military could be used domestically to defend the country in the face of attack."
The excuse of The Justice Department has refused to release the October 2001 for attorney-client privilege should make us all pause for a moment and ask "which" attorney-client is being privileged....
the faces of the unseen detainees, or the face in the picture of the article in the associated press story by Lara Jakes Jordan and Pamela Hess.
@3, I thought you were trying to lure Mr. Poe into looking.
I see STM didn't get that brevity patch slapped on danieletc. last night. On the other hand, his post is related to the topic, sort of.
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