There is just one open mic going on today. Instead of a reading, please enjoy this student-made video about Upton Sinclair, which seems to believe that 'muckraker' should be pronounced "muckwracker.'

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

It's ten o'clock, and if you're reading this, you're too late to get to the big reading of the day. Eoin Colfer, who I wrote about yesterday in Reading Tonight, and David "The Goot" Guterson will be interviewed at a taping of a weekly radio show. There are also musical guests. Don't you feel bad for sleeping in now?

Up in Port Townsend, Kim Addonizio, who used to be a poet but now writes novels, and Gary Lilley, who is a poet, will try to figure out which of them works in the art form that is dying faster. Not really. They'll talk about writing and stuff.

And at Elliott Bay Book Company, Kate Braestrup, who is a "search and rescue chaplain" will talk about her book, Here If You Need Me, which is about her life in Maine. I hate to devalue the work of a fellow Mainer, but if you're looking for something about emergency work in small-towns and other ruminations on rural life, Michael Perry's Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time is the way to go. That was such a great book.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

As part of his reelection campaign, Oklahoma County Commissioner Brent Rinehart is sending out a comic book to his constituents.

The 16-page comic book makes fun of homosexuals and criticizes Rinehart's political opponents. It features a man and woman admiring Rinehart's often-controversial political career.

Other prominent characters are an angel, who supports Rinehart, and Satan, who supports Rinehart's critics.

"It's more or less a story of my experiences of the last four years of being the county commissioner of District 2,” Rinehart said.

The story is here, you can download the comic here, and here's page 4:

(Thanks to Slog tipper Davida.)

The brouhaha earlier in the week about A Streetcar Named Desire--here, here, here, here--which devolved into an accusation (here) that I was "hiding behind" Mary McCarthy (which is sorta true), reminded me of the time, back in 2003 or 2004, I photocopied McCarthy's review of Franny and Zooey (reprinted in this book) for Sean Nelson, who is a Salinger fan and something of a Salinger expert. Nelson scribbled comments and counter-arguments all over the photocopy (like "No" and "Wrong" and "This is a means of indicting/indicating the protag., you stupid bitch") and handed it back to me. It has been hanging on my office wall ever since.

[Click on the image to make it bigger.]

I think that this is kind of a joke, but kind of serious, too:

Writing is hard. Stringing letters together to make words? Hard. Grouping those into meaningful sentences? Harder. But the hardest part? Ask any successful novelist: the hardest part is writing the opening paragraph. And the first paragraph is crucial: without it, by definition there can be no second paragraph.

They're selling first paragraphs to aspiring writers.

Here's Item #PGH48555878:

The President was in a pensive mood as he wondered what sort of arc his second term would follow, and idly surveyed what he believed to be the Washington Monument (but which was, in fact, the Capitol) through the tinted, bullet-proof windows. It had been a tough day, but as his motorcade sped along the edge of the Mall some minutes later, his body tensed as he thought about how lucky he was to have a Secretary of Defense who was so good at sucking cock.

If you want to buy it, it's $152.25, and I'd like a finder's fee, please.

(A few times a week, I take a new book with me to lunch and give it a half an hour or so to grab my attention. Lunch Date is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)

Who's your date today? The Lemur, by Benjamin Black, who is the pen name for John Banville.

Where'd you go? Ali Baba.

What'd you eat? Falafel gyro, fries, and a soda ($7.10).

How was the food? I'm a little disappointed, honestly. The fries were great, they were cooked just right and spiced perfectly, too. And I ate at Ali Baba a long time ago and was blown away by the falafel. But the Gyro was covered in this beige, pasty, mayonnaisey glop. It wasn't the usual tzatziki; it was closer to McDonald's special sauce. The reviews on our page for Ali Baba are roundly thrilled by the place, and my memory of it is much better than my experience this time. I'll try it again sometime, but it's down to last-chance status.

What does your date say about itself? Banville, who has been much more successful writing crime novels as Benjamin Black than he has writing literary fiction as John Banville, wrote The Lemur as a serial thriller in the New York Times' Sunday Funny Pages. It's about a researcher who's dug up some nasty truths about a biographer's subject. The researcher turns up dead, and the biographer has to figure out what's going on.

Is there a representative quote? "They walked east along Forty-fourth Street and Glass at last got to smoke a cigarette. The fine rain drifted down absent-mindedly, like ectoplasm. The trouble with smoking was that the desire to smoke was so much greater than the satisfaction afforded by actually smoking. Sometimes when he had a cigarette going he would forget and reach for the pack and start to light another. Maybe that was the thing to do, smoke six at a time, three in the gaps between the fingers of each hand, achieve a Gatling-gun effect."

Will you two end up in bed together? Yes. I hadn't realized until I started writing this Lunch Date that the novel was written serially, and that definitely changes the way that I'll read it—serially-written books, like Dickens, do better if you read a chapter and set the book aside for a while—but it seems like a taut little noir novel and it's well-written. It should take a couple hours, all told, and it seems enjoyably dark.

1

In simple circulation, C-M-C [Commodity-Money-Commodity], the value of commodities attained at the most a form independent of their use-values [satisfying a need--hunger, shelter, warmth, and so on], i.e., the form of money; but that same value now in the circulation M-C-M [Money-Commodity-Money], or the circulation of capital, suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts off in turn. Nay, more: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters now, so to say, into private relations with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value; as God differentiates himself as God and Son, yet both are one and of one age: for only by the surplus-value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and so soon as this takes place, so soon as the Son, and by the Son, the Father, is created, so soon does their difference vanish, and they again become one, £110.

In all honesty, I'm more amazed (enchanted) by the manner rather than the matter of Marx's writing.

2
Marx must be updated by Manuel De Landa, in the way that Bruno Latour is updating Gabriel Tarde, and António Rosa Damásio is updating Spinoza. Through Damásio, for example, we learn that the mind is in fact "the idea of the body." The mind is a Spinozistic representation of the whole body. What De Landa can do for Marx, and what Latour is doing for Tarde's theory of society (which is governed by the laws of imitation), and Damásio is doing for Spinoza's theory of the body and emotions (the affects), is to connect the best points in Marx's theory (labor-power, social metabolism, the realization of the world market) to discoveries made in the biological sciences and the growing presence of cyberspace.

3
Three things I recently learned from Bruno Latour. One, the public as a phantom rather than a body. He got the idea from a book by Walter Lippmann, Phantom Public. The idea works like this: The public is a kind of passing through, a monstrous movement, an uneasy feeling that is not clear or singular. The feeling, the movement, the mood is confused and drifting.

According to Lippmann and to the philosopher John Dewey in response to his book, [83] most of European political philosophy has been obsessed by the body and the state. They have tried to assemble an impossible parliament that represented really the contradictory wills of the multitude into one General Will. But this enterprise suffered from a cruel lack of realism. Representation, conceived in that total, complete and transparent fashion, cannot possibly be faithful. By asking from politics something it could not deliver, Europeans kept generating aborted monsters and ended up discouraging people to think politically. For politics to be able to absorb more diversity ("the Great Society" in Dewey's time and what we now call "Globalization"), it has to devise a very specific and new type of representation. Lippmann calls it a Phantom because it's disappointing for those who dream of unity and totality. Yet strangely enough, it is a good ghost, the only spirit that could protect us against the dangers of fundamentalism.

Another idea is the separation of object from thing. The philosophical tools that make this distinction possible are Heideggerian--Gegenstand/Ding. An object is simply an object--Gegenstand; a thing is something that interests humans--Ding. The ancient world once had many objects--rocks, bones, sand, earwax--that had no value, no human interest. Our world has no such objects. Everything is a thing; everything is interesting. Even things we do not know about are interesting. We want to find them at the bottom of the sea or in deep space and open them and make human sense of them.

Lastly, Latour points out this series in a lab: a rat, the brain of that rat, a neuron in the brain of that rat. Each step or part in this series has no resemblance to the other parts, though they are parts of the same thing, a rat. There seems to be no continuity from the rat to its brain, and from the brain to the cells or a single cell in that brain. Because each part is radically different, Latour proposes to see the transition from one part to the next as a complete transformation. A single thing is in reality a series of complete transformations. The implications of this way of thinking about unity are magical, particularly in the curious light of Ilya Prigogine's emergence theory.

Four readings tonight.

Up at Port Townsend, Kathleen Alcala and Chris Abani will be reading as part of the Port Townsend Writer's Conference. Abani wrote the great GraceLand, about a young man named Elvis growing up in Nigeria, and Alcala wrote Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist, which is a collection of stories set in California and Mexico.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, Adrián Arancibia reads from a collection of poems called Atacama Poems. I don't know anything else about the man, except he founded a group of poets called Taco Shop Poets in Chicago, back in the mid-nineties.

At the Shorewood High School Auditorium, Eoin Colfer reads from his newest in the young adult series, Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox. Apparently, the series is about a teenage boy who's a real dick, and several people I know who read young adult books say that it's impressive how dickish the boy remains throughout the series. In this one, he goes back in time to confront his earlier dick of a self.

Lastly, up at Third Place Books, Thor Hansen reads from The Impenetrable Forest: My Gorilla Years in Uganda, which is a book about living with gorillas in Uganda. Which is awesome, and entirely reading of the night material.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

Hey, Kay Ryan is the new poet laureate. Not a bad choice at all. Christopher wrote a nice column about her when she came to Seattle Arts & Lectures in 2005:

The idea most people have of poets is that their job is to identify and distill the meaning of human experience or the heaviness of being alive or whatever. "I loathe the idea of the poet," Ryan said. Which is why it's hard to find heavy poetic intent in Ryan's poems. "I hate significance and I really hate added significance," she said, talking about "Home to Roost," a poem she'd submitted to a magazine before 9/11 that, after 9/11, seemed stupidly rich with importance: "The chickens / are circling and / blotting out the / day. The sun is / bright, but the / chickens are in / the way. Yes, / the sky is dark / with chickens, / dense with them. / They turn and / then they turn / again. These / are the chickens / you let loose / one at a time / and small—/ various breeds. / Now they have / come home / to roost—all / the same kind / at the same speed." She pulled the poem from consideration for publication because, at the time, you couldn't publish a poem about chickens in the clear sky coming back to get you without everyone thinking you were obviously aiming at a Big Point.

Here is another poem of hers Christopher mentioned in passing, via The New York Times.

Blandeur

If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth's
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.

That's a great poem.

This bookstore in New Hampshire is trying to kick off a nationwide independent bookstore event this October:

NATIONWIDE READING MARATHONS THIS OCTOBER 2008 CELEBRATE BOOKS AND RAISE AWARENESS ABOUT READING

Independent bookstores across the country are invited to take part in a unique reading experience this coming October. Booksellers will host 24-hour reading marathons in their stores, designed to highlight the importance of reading to our culture, as well as create an opportunity for booklovers to tackle the next book on their to-read pile.

Hm. At first, when I read this, I thought they meant "Booksellers will host 24-hour readingS marathons," as in, "a group of authors will read aloud from their work for an entire day." I was thinking, "NO OH MY GOD NO." But, you know, if they want to have people sit on their floors (most Seattle bookstores don't have a whole lot of seating) and read for a day, why not? I think something like Record Store Day for bookstores would be a great idea, but this 24-hour read-a-thon might get some press, too.

Of course, at the moment, the only participating stores are two bookstores in New Hampshire (owned by the same person) and one in Utah. If other bookstores in other, less-spazzy states get involved, it might turn into something.

I got this postcard in the mail, obviously thanks to the miracle of laser-guided pinpoint marketing:

Contest Seeks Christian Poets from Seattle

SEATTLE—A $1,000 grand prize is being offered in a special poetry contest sponsored by the Christian Fine Arts Society, free to everyone. There are 50 prizes in all, including a $1,000 Grand Prize, totalling $4,000,000.

To enter, send one poem of 21 lines or less to Free Poetry Contest, 7308 Heritage Dr, Mt Vernon, Indiana 47620. Or enter online at www.freecontest.com. The deadline for entering is Aug. 18, 2008.

"We think great religious poems can inspire achievement," says Lavender Aurora, the organization's Contest Director. Poems may be written on any subject, using any style, as long as there is a spiritual inference. A typical poem might be a love poem, or poem of praise, one that inspires the reader.

Be sure your name and address appears on the page with your poem. If you wish a winner's list please enclose a return envelope.

The bad news is, I entered already—things like this are why Bill Gates invented spam-magnet Hotmail addresses—so you'll have to settle for second place. In case you're hungry for inspiration, here's my masterpiece:

We have an open mic and three other readings tonight.

Up in Port Townsend, as part of the Port Townsend Writer's Conference, Brian Evenson will be in conversation with Rebecca Brown. Brown is a Stranger Genius, and Evenson is an amazing writer of all sorts of things, including some books that are science fiction-y and horror-y and he also wrote a very good book about Robert Coover, who is one of the greatest writers of the last century. Even though it's nowhere near town, it's the reading of the night.

Some of you might be interested in the Barbara Ehrenreich reading at the Seattle Public Library. I'm not. She's reading from her new book, This Land is Their Land. I know that everyone went nuts over Nickel and Dimed, one of her previous books, but I found it to be condescending and stupid, particularly in its description of retail workers. I thought that more could be learned about class in that book from observing the way that Ehrenreich unconsciously treats the lower classes: she behaves like Jane Goodall, investigating a different species. It was one of the most maddening books I've ever read...

...but the author of the book that's made me angry most recently is also reading tonight, at Elliott Bay Book Company. Her name is Noelle Oxenhandler, and she's reading from The Wishing Year, which is a memoir about a year in which she wishes for stuff. This week's Constant Reader is all about how much I hate this book, in particular this one passage:

...Oxenhandler really embarrasses herself when thinking about race. During her year, along with a house and "spiritual healing," Oxenhandler wishes for a man. The house practically drops into her lap, and she begins dating a man named Nicholas. Unfortunately, Nicholas, who Oxenhandler portrays as a kind of retarded middle-aged man-child, is racked with guilt: It seems his great-great-great-great-grandfather owned slaves and treated them cruelly. In a form of yuppie penitence, Nicholas works an unfulfilling, low-paying job and writes apologetic letters to the slaves' descendants.

One day, as Oxenhandler is making pancakes for her poor, beleaguered man, she imagines that Aunt Jemima appears before her and says, "He has to stop punishing himself." Oxenhandler is exceedingly relieved that the African-American syrup advertisement has absolved Nicholas of generations of slave-owning guilt, and she goes about the happy work of intervening in his life. Aunt Jemima reappears at several points to bless her journey.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

This blog has been getting a whole lot of attention lately:

I am performing an experiment: for one year, I will live as Oprah advises on her television show, on her website, and in the pages of her magazines. The tagline to her website is "Live Your Best Life" and I wonder, will I truly find bliss if I commit wholeheartedly to her lifestyle suggestions?

This is probably the most blatant attempt for a memoir book deal that I've ever seen, and the premise is stupid. But I guarantee that the book will be bought and it'll sell like crazy. The only hope that I have for this not working out is if her media blitz works too well and everybody's sick of her and her stupid gimmick before she signs a deal with a publisher.

And that is why I am promoting her website.

Editor and Publisher brings news that Samuel Beckett had a correspondence with Nancy creater Ernie Bushmiller wherein he suggested some Nancy comic strip ideas. Apparently, Beckett was a big Nancy fan and he thought that his existentialism would be perfect for the comic strip. Bushmiller did not agree.

"One letter includes the following: Your gag and strip ideas for Nancy are much appreciated, and I have to say interesting, too. Many readers send me ideas for the strip, but I don't think I've ever seen any quite like yours....

"I don’t know how well they're going to work. I think the problem you're having, Sam, is the same problem any literary man might have. You're not setting up the gags visually and you're rushing to the snapper. It seems to me you've got the zingers right there at the beginning, in panel No. 1, and although I have to admit you got Nancy and Sluggo in some crackerjack predicaments, I don't see how they got there.

"For instance, putting Nancy and Sluggo in the garbage cans is a good gag, but in my opinion, you can't have them in there for all three panels. How did they get there? Same thing when you had them buried in the sand. I like to do beach gags, but I don't think that having Nancy buried up to her waist in the first two panels and then up to her neck in the third one is adequately explained, and I've been at this game for a while now. Also, why would Sluggo be facing in the opposite direction when he's talking to her?"

I wish that a couple of Beckett Nancy cartoons actually did come out. A lot of Bushmiller's gag ideas (like the one above) are so stupid that they're almost smart, or at least they're profoundly weird. A Beckett Nancy wouldn't have been that much of a stretch.

UPDATE: I am the stupid credulous fucking hack of the day for taking Editor and Publisher at their word. But I still appreciate any opportunity I might have to put a Nancy cartoon on Slog.

Lots of events tonight including a poetry slam, a book about gorillas, a book about wishing, and a book about birdwatching.

Also, at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop at noon, Craig Johnson will sign his thriller about a crime-fighting Vietnam veteran and Stella Rimington will sign her book about a counterspy trying to protetct Vladimir Putin.

At the University Book Store, Molly Blaisdell will sign her new children's book Rembrandt and the Boy Who Drew Dogs. It is about the painter. And a boy. Who likes to draw dogs. And that is all I have to say about the matter.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, David Young signs from his new collection of poetry, Black Lab,the cover of which is just up and to the left, here. Let's take a moment to admire the cover. It's impressive that the book jacket designer was given a book titled Black Lab and didn't make the whole book black, or prominently feature a photograph of a dog. Instead, the cover is yellow, and it's a photograph taken from the ground looking up at a man with a dog on a leash. I don't know Young's poetry, but I'm really fond of how this cover has avoided both the black-in-the-title cliché and the dog-in-the-title cliché. Good work, anonymous cover-making person!

Natan Sharansky is at Town Hall, reading from Defending Identity. The presser says that this is book "argues that it is better to have hostile identities framed by democracy than democrats indifferent to identity." Touché, sir, touché.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is on our books page.

Found in a coffee shop this morning: a 30-page book, allegedly written by the alleged father of this alleged country—when he was allegedly 14 years old!—on how not to be a total jackass.

"2nd: Put not your hands to any part of the body not usually discovered."

"13th: Kill no vermin as fleas, lice, ticks &c in the sight of others; if you see any filth or thick spittle, put your foot dexteriously upon it; if it be upon the clothes of your companions, put it off privately; and if it be upon your own clothes, return thanks to him who puts it off."

"38th: In visiting the sick, do not presently play the physician if you be not knowing therein."

Word.

A book about a con artist mom and three other events tonight.

Up in Port Townsend, Anne Waldman, who is one of the last surviving Beat poets (well, depending on who you ask—I've talked to quite a few old men who think that women can't be Beats), will read work from one of her 40 books. This is part of the Writer's Conference that's going on up in Port Townsend all week.

Over at Elliott Bay Book Company, Rachel Kushner reads from her novel Telex from Cuba, which is a debut novel set in Cuba just before Castro. I hear that Colonel Sanders is a character in the book, which is an automatic plus.

And then, up at the University Book Store, Connie Willis, the author of To Say Nothing of the Dog, reads from her newest work, All Seated on the Ground. Willis is an amazing sci-fi author, and she's been around for a while now. This is the reading of the night, and you should obviously go.

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is over here.

Over at Enter the Octopus, there's some speculation about sci-fi author John Twelve Hawks. I first heard about Hawks when I was a bookseller. I was told that he was signed by the same editor who signed Dan (Da Vinci Code) Brown, that his book The Traveler was supposed to be the next big thing, and that he lived totally off the grid. Off the grid was repeated many, many times, the way that everyone was so crazy about the fact that Jackie Chan did his own stunts many years ago.

Lately, a few book bloggers have been getting letters from Hawks, and some people think this is a big promotion for Hawks' next book, The Dark River. Matt at Octopus thinks that Hawks is a pen name for a group of authors. I think that he might be a pen name for one, already-established sci-fi author who figured that the romantic backstory of someone who lives in the woods and only communicates, Unabomer-style, with letters and handwritten manuscripts, would sell some books.

Whatever. I read the first seventy-five pages of The Traveler and I couldn't give a good goddamn about any of it.

Maud links to Power Moby Dick, which has extensive annotations for the novel and is really quite attractively designed.

I don't know about reading the entire thing from a website, but I do think that online annotations can be useful tour guides to a complex book. The above site looks much more straightforward than this batshitcrazy, but kind of fun when you get used to it, Gravity's Rainbow companion website.

It's time for the 21st century's currently-most-popular ebook reader to go backward a couple thousand years:

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that Christian book publishers Augsburg Fortress, Crossway Books & Bibles, David C. Cook, Gospel Light, Group Publishing, NavPress, Strang Communications, Thomas Nelson, Tyndale, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. and Zondervan have committed to making the majority of their catalogs of books available to Kindle owners by the end of 2008. Anywhere they happen to be, and in less than 60 seconds, Kindle customers will be able to download and start reading favorite Christian titles such as "Boundaries," "Walking With God," and "When the Game Is Over."

Tyndale does the atrocious Left Behind series, the first of which is one of the most hateful books I've ever read. Amazon is doing it wrong: everybody knows that the first application of a new technology is porn. Christianity comes way later.

A book about utopia, an open mic, and a whole lot more going on tonight.

Up in Port Townsend, it's the Port Townsend Writer's Conference, a weeklong festival packed with readings. Today, Chris Abani, who wrote Graceland and now seems to put out a book every week or so, will be reading. He's always fun live. Also in Port Townsend, Joan Larkin, who has edited many, many excellent gay and feminist anthologies, will be speaking.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, Susanna Sonnenberg reads from Her Last Death, which is a memoir about Sonnenberg's mother, who was a con artist. There seem to be a whole lot of memoirs about con artist parents. This of course means that con artists frequently beget writers, which says something about writers, I think.

Lastly, up at Third Place Books, Marten Troost reads from Lost on Planet China: The Strange and True Story of One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation, or How He Became Comfortable Eating Live Squid. Sometimes I wish that I could Google-cache search books that are in my hand, because I'd love to know if the word 'inscrutable' shows up in this book and I'm too lazy to scour. The fact that there's a fortune-cookie fortune on the cover seems to imply things about this book that I'm simply not ready to consider this early in the morning.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

Only one reading today, up at Third Place Books. It's a reading to celebrate the release of the second issue of Drash, which is a literary magazine with some emphasis on Northwest and/or Jewish, you know, stuff.

Here is a bonus book review I found on YouTube:

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

A book by a "Seattle plant and tree expert," a book with the overpunctuated title Day Hike! Olympic Peninsula: The Best Trails You Can Hike in a Day, an open mic, and several other readings today.

Zach Plague is at the Hugo House reading from boring boring boring boring boring boring boring, which is billed as "a typo/graphic novel." There'll be a Stranger Suggests box for this one popping up soonish, so I won't repeat myself here.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, Rayo Casablanca reads from his debut novel, Six Sick Hipsters. It's about someone who's killing hipsters, and it's a mystery.

And at Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Yasmine Galenorn reads from her book Dragon Wytch: Sisters of the Moon, Book 4, which is actually a book about vampires, even though you'd think it was about dragons or wytches (sic).

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

Christopher Frizzelle on the sad disappearance of Nextbook:

Nextbook's goal to promote Jewish literature was built around books, not beliefs; never had an exclusionary vibe to it; and was always marketed to the mainstream. In contrast to small bookstore readings or Seattle Arts & Lectures' giant hall, Nextbook's readings and onstage interviews (more than a dozen a year) often happened in bars—the Rendezvous, Tractor Tavern, places like that.

It's a great look back at why Nextbook was so important, and a consideration of the big hole it's going to leave in Seattle's reading scene. You should read it.

FiveThirtyEight has a fairly comprehensive link-happy list of all the Obama comparisons that have been made in the last few months. Obama has been compared to both Bushes, Bob Dole, John Kerry, Richard Nixon, and just about every politician ever to be involved in presidential politics except Taft.

In other news, the Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle website has been transformed into an incredibly cheap-ass book.

(A few times a week, I take a new book with me to lunch and give it a half an hour or so to grab my attention. Lunch Date is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)

Who's your date today? Muhajababes by Allegra Stratton.

Where'd you go? In the Bowl

What'd you eat? Fake-beef yakisoba ($7.95).

How was the food? It was really good. It's super-spicy—they must've gotten quite a few complaints, because there are warnings posted everywhere about how spicy the food is—but it was a tasty, hot bowl of noodles. And I love the fake beef, which I believe is made from compressed mushroom stalks. I liked it better than Boom Noodle's yakisoba.

What does your date say about itself? "Meet the new Middle East—young, sexy and devout." The Times Literary Supplement says it "will disabuse you of your preconceptions of the Middle East forever."

Is there a representative quote? Talking about Superstar, the Middle Eastern American Idol: "She explained that Musa liked to think, though he'd never say it, that Superstar is better than Jazeera. While al-Jazeera does get between 40 million and 50 million regular viewers, 15 million voted on the outcome of Superstar, 'more Arabs than have ever cast ballots in a free election.'"

Will you two end up in bed together? Yes. The book feels a little slight so far, as though it would maybe be better off as a series of magazine articles, but writing about the youth in the Middle East is important, and something I haven't read much about. A giant baby boom happened in the Middle East 20 or 30 years ago, and all those people are ultimately going to have a lot to do with what the world will look like. The writing is all right, and the title is really atrocious, but I think that I'll stick with it.

Two authors that I wrote about yesterday are reading again tonight, along with an open mic, a thriller, and several other events.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, Johan Bruyneel reads from We Might as Well Win: On the Road to Success with the Mastermind Behind the Eight Tour de France Victories. Apparently, people refer to Bruyneel as "the Vince Lombardi of cycling,” which is a really funny image.

After Bruyneel, David Wroblewski will read from his new novel, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which is about a family raising a unique dog breed. It's getting pretty decent reviews, but I have not read it yet.

And at the Hugo House, it's time to say goodbye to their current crop of writers-in-residence. Wendy Call, Todd Faulkner, David Wagoner and Cody Walker will be reading. I bet at least one of them will get misty, which will be entertaining in its own right. I expressed my love for Wagoner a few months back. A new crew, including Cienna Madrid, will begin writing, um, in residence at the Hugo House this fall.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is on our Books page.

He was an author who did it to promote a book. I know that we're in the age of alternative book marketing, as defined by Bugliosi's anti-Bush book that just hit the New York Times Bestseller list without any marketing from a major publisher, but this is a bit much.

Also a bit much? The fact that the book being promoted by the human fly was "argues that Sept. 11 was part of a plot by al-Qaida to provoke the U.S. into invading Iraq, according to a book summary at Amazon.com."

It's a whole new strain of Truthers, and, if possible, it makes even less sense than the original. ( I hope they call themselves the Truthiers.) Somehow bin Laden planned the whole thing to happen exactly as it did? Genius!

David Rothman, who is always very excited about e-books, brings news that the iTunes store might be incorporating e-books into the music and movies. This comes on the heels of multiple news stories reporting that the new 3G iPhone will have an e-reader function. Rothman says that this is "one more reason why publishers would be foolish to be Kindle-centric," which is absolutely true. Of course, they shouldn't be iTunes -centric, either.

If all this actually happens, it's one step closer to what I think will be the real future of the e-book. It's not going to replace anything, it's just another distribution system for publishers, and could very well result in more people reading more books.

A man is suing two Bible publishers for printing what he claims to be a bad translation of the original text, which has resulted in institutional homophobia. The suit claims $70,000,000 in damages.

This is from a wonderful blogger's summary of the case:

What is at issue is the meaning of the words μαλακοι and αρσενοκοιται The usual view is that they refer to men who engage in homosexual acts. μαλακοι are those taken to play the "feminine" role, αρσενοκοιται those taken to play the "masculine" role. That these refer to homosexuals of some sort is clear from the Latin translation, produced in the 5th century, which uses molles "soft ones" for μαλακοι and masculorum concubitores "those who sleep with men" for αρσενοκοιται.

...

As I understand Fowler's complaints, he is not arguing that the New Testament, when translated correctly, discriminates against him as a gay man. Rather, he thinks that the publishers were negligent in publishing Bibles containing what in his view is an erroneous translation, one that, he thinks, falsely condemns homsexuality.

Of course, the right wing blogs, which I'm not going to link to, are having a field day with this, along the lines of : "Liberals are suing Jesus! Next, they'll sue all of us for praying in the comfort of our own homes!" But, really, this is a pretty fascinating lawsuit about the nuances of translation, which is just the kind of nerdery that makes me tingle.

Via Maud.

The Booker of Bookers tournament, an attempt to decide on the best Booker Prize winner of the 40 years of the prize's history, has settled on Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Midnight's Children won the 25th anniversary Booker of Bookers award, too, which means that it is clearly the best book ever. Or the best book of the last 40 years. Or the best of the 40 books that were chosen as winners of the Booker over the last 40 years. Or something. Right?

We have a two mystery authors tonight (one who writes about a "skeleton detective" and one who titles a book Rock and Roll Never Forgets: A JP Kincaid Mystery and apparently thinks that that's a good idea.) and many other readings.

At Queen Anne Books, local author Garth Stein, who wrote The Art of Racing in the Rain, which is the novel from the point of view of a dog, reads. It's also the big Starbucks book of choice at the moment. And this reading will feature free cookies. There will also be cookies for dogs, but dogs aren't allowed at the reading.

Up at Third Place Books, Guyanne Booth, whose first name is Guyanne, will be reading from Robber's Roost, which is about a family that moves in with a bunch of robbers. And then wacky hijinx and important life lessons, no doubt, will ensue.

Elliott Bay Book Company has a couple of authors, Lin and Leif Enger, reading from their respective books. Leif wrote a book called Peace Like a River a few years ago that critics hated but independent booksellers seemed to love. I hated the hell out of that book—it felt like super-generic literary fiction to me—and at the time I was both a critic and an independent bookseller. I haven't read his new book, but if you'll permit me to judge it by its cover, I think it looks like more of the same. I have not even looked at Lin's book. The one thing you can guarantee about this reading is that it will be twice as long as other book readings.

At the Richard Hugo House, Susanna Lang will read from Even Now, a collection of poems. Here is a link to one of Ms. Lang's narrative poems, called "Pussywillow." I actually really like the poem (except for the last line), but that's still enough to make this the reading of the night.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

GalleyCat brings news that Dutch mystery author Janwillem van de Wetering has died. Van de Wetering is the author of the Amsterdam Cops series, of which there were fourteen installments. Soho Press was just about to reissue his books. A lot of my mystery-reading friends—people with really good taste—have recommended him to me. I haven't read any of his books yet, but I have a couple at home waiting for me.

Used Books Blog put up a post about Borders reorganizing their corporate plan. The post became an apparently much-needed place for Borders employees to collect and gripe about the changes the corporation made and how they affect them:

From the front lines, those “strategic alternatives” included getting rid of managers and supervisors, eliminating the employee gift card of $25/mo. for full time employees, eliminating time and a half for all employees working holidays and the thing that is guaranteed to save their rosy butts — charging employees 35 cents for tea and coffee that had been previously free.

Corporations are always so classy when they're desperately trying not to go bankrupt.

There's a great piece today in the San Francisco Chronicle--I know! weird, right?--about reading books. Look, you're already asleep. You're already scrolling past this.

Mark Morford writes:

See, I love books. Admire and appreciate and adore. Was a lit major at Berkeley, still love to read, still like to consider myself a big consumer of books and deep thinker about bookish issues and ideas.

And yet, if I'm painfully honest, I have to admit it: I barely read books anymore. Not nearly the way I used to, anyway. Not for a long, long time. And chances are, if you're at all drawn to the new media vortex, neither do you.

He's right, of course--the internet's pulling all of us away from books. Except maybe Paul Constant, who somehow posts more than anyone on Slog (except possibly Savage and ECB) and, at the same time, reads three books per weekend.

A teenage poetry reading followed by an open mic, a poetry slam, and a guide to "flora gawking" tonight, along with a few other readings.

Up at Third Place Books, Asara Lovejoy reads from The One Command, which is about creating wealth "with six steps to theta, the brainwave that opens unlimited potential and financial good." Something tells me there's gonna be a whole lot of brain use at this reading.

At the Seattle Public Library, Stephen L. Carter reads from his new mystery thriller, Palace Council. I was excited about this book—Nixon's a character—but then I read this Entertainment Weekly review of the book, which begins like this:

Stephen L. Carter's new novel, Palace Council, comes billed as a political thriller, but the most compelling mystery here has nothing to do with its botched suspense plot. How is it that the writer of The Emperor of Ocean Park and New England White — bona fide page-turners set among the black upper class — has published a third novel that reads like a first draft? Why would this Yale Law professor and celebrated public intellectual construct a sub-Dan Brown cryptography thriller that panders to yahoo paranoia about New World Order high jinks?

And now I don't want to read it anymore. (And before anyone gets huffy, I have to say that Entertainment Weekly does good reviews of thrillers and other pop-lit books. I don't trust their judgment on literary fiction, but in this case, the comparison to Dan Brown alone is enough to make me skip Palace Council. I've read enough Da Vinci Code ripoffs in the last few years, thankyewverymuch.)

And at Elliott Bay Book Company, in the best-looking reading of the night, Steve Kozlowski reads from The Last Polar Bear, which is a book about polar bears and how we're fucking slaughtering them. The first thing we have to do is keep them away from treadmills:

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.

io9 reports on the new, free downloadable version of the world's longest novel, Marienbad, My Love, by Mark Leach. It's 12.6 million words long. The press release has all kinds of interesting information about the book's record-breakingness, including:

* the world's longest word. Also called "the holy Jah," the 4.4-million-letter noun is a coinage of words from the world's faiths. It means "god within."

* the world's longest sentence (3 million words).

* the world's longest book title (6,700 words).

The website also has the Top Ten reasons to read Marienbad, My Love:

1. A giant orbiting UFO 2. Nazi/alien collaborations 3. Alien abductions 4. Human/alien hybrids 5. Mind control 6. Religious insects from outer space 7. A mad scientist 8. An evil CEO 9. A time-traveling, green-skinned monster of the unconscious 10. The end of the world

You know, I've been trying to find another book to revive Book Club of the Damned here on Slog, but I think I'd rather choose a book that I can successfully read in my lifetime. Still and all, it's totally free! Go! Download! Enjoy! And don't say I never gave you anything.

I haven't read anything by Terry Pratchett, the fantasy humorist, in quite some time, though I read all of his books when I was a teenager. I hadn't thought of Pratchett in a good long while, either, until about six months ago, when he announced that he was suffering from a rare, early-onset form of Alzheimer's.

The Internet—or at least the geek-and-lit blogs portion of it—is abuzz about this piece that Pratchett, an avowed atheist, wrote for the Daily Mail. It's about whether he is more prone to believe in God, now that the end is in sight. I think that it's a classy, generous essay, and well worth reading.

Three readings tonight.

At the Elliott Bay Book Company, Kaya McLaren reads from her reissued novel, Church of the Dog. Here is what Publisher's Weekly says about the book:

...The result is an ersatz inspirational novel that mistakes the characters' tendencies to natter on about God and ethics and spout goofy New Age-isms for plot or character development.

And here is what Emerging Crone has to say about it:

It is impossible to encounter this book and not have your heart expanded.

Sounds like we have an old-fashioned "critics are just so full of hate that they can't appreciate a beautiful, inspirational book for what it is" battle going on. To figure out what side of the fight you fall on, you might want to go to this reading. I'm not going, because Emerging Crone's website has already given me hives from all its New Agey foo-foo.

Up at Third Place Books, Garth Stein reads from The Art of Racing in the Rain. Stein is local, and his book is prominently displayed in just about every Starbucks in the nation. It's told from the point of view of a dog. I haven't read it.

Lastly, and bestly, Cory Doctorow is back in town at the University Book Store. He was here a month or so ago for his young adult novel Little Brother, but I think that this will be a reading of new work. This is clearly the reading of the night.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is ready for you.

From the book editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Dear Colleagues,

For three years, it's been my joy to help unleash your opinions upon the world, or at least the corner of it in northeast Ohio. Thank you for making the books pages one of the smartest, most diverse, liveliest and unpredictable sections of The Plain Dealer.

Starting this Sunday, July 6, that joy is reduced by 25 percent. The pages are being cut to one and one-half. Nobody following the news biz can pretend to be surprised, but all of us can be sad, just the same.

The most important part of this email, however, is to stress that a reduction of 25 percent still allows us a passing grade, especially if we spend the real estate we do have more wisely.

The Plain Dealer has a really good books page. In fact, I think it's probably the best part of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The letter ends with a request that people e-mail the Plain Dealer with requests to keep their book section at the size it is presently. Regardless of the glee that some people are taking in the print media's demise, it's sad that editors have to beg for letter-writing campaigns to convince people that their sections are important and relevant.