This one is A Love Story That Survived Death: Dick Haymes, World War II Crooner, Hollywood Movie Star & perhaps Edward VII's heir comes to life in...Heaven Knows, Anything Goes by Dianne DeMarinis de la Vega, PhD.

The blurb that got cut off at the end there is by Roger Corman and it reads "This will make a great movie" or something close to that.

On the left, a book with the author's drawing of a monkey on the cover. On the right, A Poet Gone Mad. The scroll reads: "Poetries of/reality/Brought to the/forefront./Humor/Contraversial/Political/Sarcasm/Social/Problems."

There are three readings tonight. It's kind of a choose-your-poison kind of thing.

If you're into fly fishing, Lou Ureneck reads from Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska up at Third Place Books. Are there any fly-fishing fans on Slog?

Elliott Bay Book Company brings us The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural, and the Healing Power of Hope, which is a memoir from a neurosurgeon who believes in the supernatural. I don't know if I'd want my neurosurgeon to believe in the supernatural, frankly, but there you go.

And at the University Book Store, Troy Denning reads from his new Star Wars spin-off novel, about Luke Skywalker's niece and nephew. The 501st Division of Storm Troopers,who I wrote about here, will be in attendance. Those of you who left these comments on that post:

Can those storm troopers remove just their codpiece? i'm just sayin.

and

(W)e are so on the same page. Can one of those Storm Troopers fuck my brains out?

This is your chance, ladies and/or gentlemen. Go get 'em!

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

Last night, I attended the American Booksellers Association Celebration. There was a lot of back-patting and award-giving, as many of these convention celebrations tend to be guilty of. But the big deal was at the conclusion. The ABA announced that they were doing away with BookSense, which is the outreach arm of the ABA. Most independent bookstores carry the BookSense 76 fliers, which are little four-page fliers packed with recommendations from booksellers around the country. After they announced the death of BookSense, there was a little light show and then they announced that the new slogan/website/philosophy of independent bookstores around the country was going to be...

...IndieBound.

As in, "I'm bound to be going to an independent store," I guess. When they announced that bookstores around the county were going to start carrying IndieBound fliers (Changed from the BookSense 76 to the hipper-than-thou 'NextList.'), suddenly the hall was filled with skipping girls handing out IndieBound Declarations of Indpendence and IndieBound pins and those plastic glow-necklaces that people wear at raves, only in the official color of IndieBound, which is red. People said things like "Welcome to the revolution" and "The revolution is now." Apparently, independent bookstores are becoming Russian revolutionaries.

The reaction in the hall was decidedly mixed. Not everyone seemed to be buying into the IndieBound revolution, although you can already buy the IndieBound Gear at the IndieBound website:

I've included the Declaration of IndieBound after the jump. Just for fun.

Continue reading "Indie Bound?" »

Like I said, there's not a lot going on at BEA today. There are programs for aspiring writers at the actual convention center and there's bookselling school going on at the hotel, but I won't hear anything about how those went until later tonight. So I found myself in the odd (for me) position of wandering down Hollywood Boulevard with nothing to do.

Then I happened upon a building that looked like a bank. Over the door, it said "The L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition." My next hour was mapped before my very eyes. I wandered inside.

The first thing you see upon walking inside the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition is a waterfall with a bust of L. Ron Hubbard. To the right, there is a welcoming desk and a woman with a weird Dutch accent. To the left, there is a giant wall of quotes from many luminaries about what L. Ron Hubbard means to them. There is a quote from Tom Cruise, Actor, of course, and Nancy Cartwright, Voice of Bart Simpson from TV's The Simpsons and so on and so on.

Then the weird Dutch lady summoned a man with a weird Dutch accent. His stripey tie perfectly matched his stripey shirt. I was to go with the man. We went through a door that required a security badge and then, suddenly, I was awash in Hubbard.

And you will be, too, if you follow me after the jump.

Continue reading "My Kind of Tourism" »

It used to be, when I went to BEA as a bookseller, I'd try to read a classic, in order to keep my head amid all the shiny new free books. I've read The Scarlet Letter at BEA--if you haven't read that book since high school, you really should; it's amazing--and one year, pretentiously, I brought Billy Budd along with me. But since I started writing Constant Reader, every time that I've flown, I've tried to read something popular.

This time, I brought The Broken Window, by Jeffery Deaver. This is a Lincoln Rhyme mystery, which may ring a bell for you because of The Bone Collector, an adaptation of a Deaver novel of the same name starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. I've been reading these books for years--they're the definition of guilty pleasures. Lincoln Rhyme is a paralyzed forensics detective. His lover and partner is Amelia Sachs, a former model and muscle-car enthusiast who is a tough-as-nails cop.

These books are bad. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the hell out of them, but they're super-poorly written. Especially when Deaver tries to write African-American dialogue, which invariably sounds like something out of Song of the South. Rhyme sends Sachs out to investigate crime scenes left by meticulously clean serial killers. Sachs almost always winds up captured by the serial killers. And things end happily, but Rhyme remains grim.

Deaver loathed the casting of Denzel Washington as Lincoln Rhyme. You can tell this because, in just about every Rhyme mystery that has come out since The Bone Collector movie, Deaver comments about how much Rhyme looks like Tom Cruise.

Window is about identity theft, and the serial killer is of course someone who uses the system to track victims. Things are going well for the killer, until he accidentally frames Rhyme's cousin. Then, of course, he's in the shit. I read this book in one sitting, from the airport to the runway at LAX. All I can say is, if you dig on pulp geniuses--from Sherlock Holmes to Doc Savage--this might be your thing. Just don't expect anything resembling good writing.

I think that Deaver might be a little sensitive about the quality of his work, though. The dedication on this one reads:

To a dear friend, the written word.

Sure thing, Jeff. Your Nobel is right around the corner. Just keep the cheesy forensic mysteries coming.

I'm officially in and registered at BEA.

In order to save a little money, I decided to split a hotel room with a bookseller from a Seattle-area bookstore. I let the bookstore pick the hotel.

This was a mistake.

I am now lodged at the Renaissance Hollywood at Hollywood and Highland, and it will kill me before the end of the weekend. The hotel is literally connected to an outdoor mall, and outside, tourists are posing for photos around the clock on the Walk of Fame. There's the Kodak Theater and a wax museum and the Guinness Book of World Records Museum and a Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum, too. And a Disney Store and Soda Fountain. I do not get along well with tourists.

Last night, I was walking a friend to a taxi and the sidewalk was blocked by a mass of people. It turns out that the front of Graumann's Chinese Theater was blocked for the world premiere of You Don't Mess With the Zohan, the new Adam Sandler movie about a Mossad agent (Sandler) who wants to move to America and become a hairdresser. This will no doubt be hee-larious.

I wound up in the crush of the Sandlerphiliacs. Tourists wandered into the mass of people holding their cel phones and cameras high in the air, pointed at the red carpet. "Who are we waiting for?" the tourists would say, "What's going on?" And then, after nobody would tell them, they'd take out their cameras and hold them high in the air and point them at the red carpet, figuring that they'd at least wind up with a picture of a celebrity, even if they don't know who that celebrity will be.

A woman tried to step off the curb to get a better picture, even though there was no Sandler in sight. One of Sandler's body guards started yelling at her. "What's your problem?" the woman asked him. "You are my problem. You are my very big problem,' he said. She started arguing with him until he told her to "Shut up! Shut your damn mouth!" over and over again and ushered the woman out of the mass of people.

I got tired of waiting and left, went back to my hotel, and called a cab for my friend from there. I didn't see Adam Sandler, or any of his costars, and I didn't get any photos at all. I apologize to the Sandler-happy Slog public.

Today is a slow day at BEA. There are a lot of educational programs. Almost all the booksellers are at my hotel for something called Bookseller School. There will apparently be a major announcement about ABA, the conglomeration of independent booksellers, this afternoon. Nobody knows what it will be.

I took the subway in to the Staples Center. I have learned two gross generalizations about Los Angeles already. Gross generalization number one: There are cameras everywhere, and there are signs everywhere telling you that there are cameras everywhere. There's a scary billboard of a cop's chest and it reads "I'm watching. Are you?" It feels kind of military police-y.

Gross generalization number two: There is no free wi-fi anywhere. My hotel requires a fee for wi-fi, and so does the Staples Center. My poor little Asus EEE laptop is virtually useless here. I am typing this on a rickety old Windows computer in the press lounge. Someone from some magazine is breathing down my neck for the computer. If I should disappear, blame U.S. News and World Report. I've always had the feeling that that magazine had it in for me.

Stuff is going on everywhere tonight, including a young adult novelist, a book about gardening, an open mic or two, a group reading, and a book about keeping up with our parents or, alternately, not keeping up with our parents.

There'll be a recommends popping up soon about the Cheap Wine and Poetry event at the Hugo House. Suffice it to say: David Schmader. Wine at $1 a glass. Why wouldn't you go?

There's a group reading at the University Book Store that explores the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens in "both poetry and prose, with literary and scientific writing."

At Town Hall, Chuck Palahniuk is reading from his new, horrible book Snuff. I write about this book in Constant Reader, which you can find here:

And here comes Snuff, a skinny book with gigantic, beginning-reader-style print about five people filming a gang-bang who are tied together through secret connections. There’s lots of information about porn films. There’s a litany of trivia about Hollywood actors who nearly died while filming their roles. And there’s a climax so intentionally outrageous that it couldn’t have been written with a straight face. No doubt people will love it because it is, like Mountain Dew and Dane Cook and various other safe and over-packaged products, extreme.

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, can be found over here.

This afternoon, I'll be flying to Los Angeles to attend Book Expo America. Two years ago, I wrote about attending BEA as a bookseller, and here's my description of the event:

Every year, over one weekend in May, publishers, bookstore owners, Amazon.com employees, and big-chain-bookstore buyers all converge on one major American city to reflect on the past year and prepare for the next one. There are several major players at BookExpo America: The New York publishing houses all have a commanding presence, as do Barnes & Noble and Borders and Amazon.com, and also ABA, the American Booksellers Association, a conglomeration of independent bookstores that use their combined weight as leverage against the aforementioned nationwide monsters.

All day tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday, I'll be live-blogging from the Staples Center and the attendant fancy celebrity-laden parties in the evening. This is where the publishers unleash their fall lineups and bring the authors to booksellers and librarians in a desperate attempt to beg for shelf space. It should be fun.

For those of you playing catch-up, Brad bet me fifty bucks I couldn't read I Will Fear No Evil, a late Heinlein sci-fi novel, from cover to cover. Although I'd read Heinlein before, this book, about Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, a dying wealthy old man who has his brain transplanted into the nubile young body of his secretary, quickly proved to be atrocious. For reasons unexplained, the secretary still lives inside the brain of Johann--who now answers to Joan--and the remainder of the novel consists of Joan making out with old friends from his/her past life.

Here's part one. Here's part two.

Over Memorial Day Weekend, I made a solemn vow that I would finish reading I Will Fear No Evil that weekend--I'd taken too many breaks to read other books for, you know, the books section of the paper. So I sat down and read. And read. And read. And I kept falling asleep. I took four naps over Memorial Day weekend, and each of those naps is directly attributable to being bored by I Will Fear No Evil's long passages about legal issues and stretches of the book where Joan sat quietly and posed for one painting after another. The parenthetical mental sparring of Johann and his secretary Eunice continued:

(...But, Boss, you're a devious little slut--you can't be truthful even to yourself.) (Wench, if I could get my hands on you, I'd spank you!) (And if you could, I'd let you. Kind o' fun to be spanked, isn't it, dear? Gets the action moving like a rocket.) (Oh, stuff it!) (Where, twin? What? And how big is it?)

The action continues exactly in the manner I described in Part 2. I can't figure out one goddamned reason why this book is five hundred pages long, except that, as earlier commenters have pointed out, Heinlein was probably dying when he wrote it and didn't have time nor inclination to edit. Finally, at the conclusion of the book--after a plot 'twist' which makes absolutely no sense--a child is born. This is the end. And I won the goddamned fifty bucks.

There were passages that I liked, but those passages, tellingly, had nothing to do with the actual story. After about halfway through, each chapter began with a few scattershot paragraphs explaining how the future was barreling forward into itself, maybe toward Armageddon:

The Postmaster General died from an overdose of barbiturates; the career Assistant Postmaster General declined an interim appointment and put in for retirement. A woman in Albany gave birth to a 'faun' which was baptized, dead, and cremated in eighty-seven minutes. No flowers. No photographs. No interviews--but the priest wrote a letter to his seminary roommate.

I can see teenagers plowing through this book for the illicit sex talk, or diehard Heinlein fans adoring it for its, um, full expression of his weird anti-feminism feminism. But to the layman, this is a completely useless book. It is not Heinlein's Showgirls. It is not so bad it's good. It is just a bad book that should be forgotten.

Study Questions:

Will I spend all my fifty dollar winnings on gin drinks tonight in order to forget this book?

An Indiana law intended to register porn stores with the state government is actually going to affect a number of bookstores that sell anything that could be construed as pornography, up to and including Our Bodies, Ourselves. All offending bookstores, besides being registered with the government, will have to pay a $250 filing fee. There's an audio report here.

A reading about hiking on Mount Rainier, a couple of poets whose work I am entirely unfamiliar with, and a Poetry Slam tonight.

Also, at Elliott Bay Book Company, Steven Galloway reads from The Cellist of Sarajevo, which is a debut novel that a lot of local booksellers are talking about. It's about three people's lives intersecting in a besieged Sarajevo, and it's based, in part, on true events.

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is way over yonder by the holler tree.

A whole bunch of readings tonight, including a mystery and a book about going to Mars.

Also: Jennie Shortridge is at the University Book Store with The Coffee Shop at the Center of the Universe, about a woman who has a crisis and becomes a barista, and so learns about the world. I don't believe that the coffee shop is a misogynistic Chica Latte affair where the workers wear lingerie or swim suits. That would be a different book. With a foreword by Camille Paglia.

And at Elliott Bay Book Company, Adam Leith Gollner reads from The Fruit Hunters, which "is a rollicking account of the world of fruit and fruit fanatics." Then, after Gollner, Mary Tillman, mother of Pat Tillman, will read from her new book Boots on the Ground by Dusk. I'm willing to bet that 9/11 Truth people will be in attendance, trying to gather 'clues,' since Tillman has unfortunately become the Saint of 9/11 Truth.

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

No book-related activities today. Enjoy your memorializations.

And you should read a book, too. If you simply can't wait to see what readings are upcoming, the readings calendar, is up for your perusal.

There's a lot going on for a Sunday. At Borders, two mystery authors will read. One writes month-themed, humorous mysteries. This one is called Knee High by the Fourth of July. And also, there's a book called--yawn--Murder For Hire. But MFH's author "is an ex-B movie actress with a background in theatrical sword fighting." Zing!

At Secret Garden, John Sensel reads from his children's book The Humming of Numbers, which is about a monk falling in love.

And at Third Place Books, Shaila Catherine reads from Focused and Fearless, which, according to Third Place Books' website, is "a rich step-by-step guide to the jhanas--a powerful meditative technology that leads us to fearless and deep joy, radiant clam(sic) and a truly abiding happiness." Radiant clam! This has to be the best reading of the day.

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is up for your perusal.

Only two readings today: at the Ballard Branch of the Seattle Public Library is Linda Sue Park, who is the author of books with such pleasant titles as Kite Fighters and Project Mulberry and Bee Bim Bop. They're young adult novels. I really do like the titles, though.

And at Elliott Bay, Regina Hackett will be interviewing painter Joseph Goldberg, who has a book out from UW Press called Jeweled Earth.

And that is all.

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

Keith Gessen--a founding editor of n+1 (here's a great piece about money and the writing life), author of a novel called All the Sad Young Literary Men, and a touch-football player--came through town a couple weeks ago. This week in The Stranger's book section, he writes about his experience.

A paragraph of it:

The reading at Elliott Bay was, until I got to Cleveland, the friendliest I've done. I read a portion of the book that deals with New York, the bounty of New York, of what it's like to finally get everything you thought you wanted but get it all too late--a part I had not read aloud since an audience in D.C. sat in stony silence through all the jokes and then asked, as their first collective question, "So these are problems specific to New York?" I had put that chapter away after that, but on the day of the reading decided the Seattleites could handle it. And I was right.

Also discussed: the Hotel Monaco ("sensible"), the price of hamburgers in Seattle ("it's possible I was hallucinating"), Portland ("it struck me, this time, as just a little too self-satisfied"), airline travel ("airline travel, let's face it, is immoral"), and the spirit of Old Seattle ("it was in Seattle that I finally went off the rails of my tour").

It's a pleasure.

(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? Serve The People! by Yan Lianke.

Where'd you go? My birthday is on Saturday and my license is about to expire, so for lunch I went to the downtown office of the Washington State Department of Licensing, on Spring between 2nd and 3rd.

What'd you eat? Nothing.

How was the food? Actually, with the prevalent ass smell of the DOL, I kind of lost my appetite, anyway.


What does your date say about itself? The dust jacket says that this is a Chinese novel that has been banned in China. It found popularity on the internet and is now being published by the lovely paperback original Black Cat imprint. It's about a love afffair in 1967 Mao Zedong's Communist China. A blurb on the dust jacket reads:

"This novel slanders Mao Zedong, the army, and is overflowing with sex...do not distribute, pass around, comment on, excerpt from it, or report on it." --Chinese Central Propaganda Bureau

Is there a representative quote? "This, plainly, was the Division Commander's workroom--like a novelist's study, but a hundred thousand times more important. Wu Dawang blinked at the frenzies of blood-red arrows and multicolored lines swarming over maps punctuated by brightly scrawled circles, triangles and squares--as if an entire garden had burst into glorious bloom inside the house. He instinctively averted his gaze."

Will you two end up in bed together? Yes. I only got about twelve pages in--more on this in a minute--but even though it's based in 1960s China, it reads almost like dystopic science fiction. The dry, wry sense of humor is especially appreciated. It's pretty rare that someone gets a chance to read a novel that is actually subversive. And as for the DOL: I actually got in and out in about fifteen minutes, which was pretty impressive, although I am now the owner of the Worst Driver's License Picture In The World. Also, I left with absolutely no appetite because the stench was worse than riding the bus. But the experience was nowhere near as bad as it could've been.

Word on the street is that Stranger writer Cienna Madrid has just been offered a position as a Writer-In-Residence at the Richard Hugo House.

She's one of my favorites here at the paper, and she's been wanting to branch into fiction writing for some time now, so this should work out well, both for her and for the Hugo House. And those of you who have been (rightfully) complaining that she hasn't been writing enough lately will soon be seeing lots of new work by Ms. Madrid.

This is really exciting.

Robert Asprin, who was known primarily for the MythAdventure series of humorous fantasy novels, has died. I haven't read one of his books, really, since I was twelve and discovered Terry Pratchett, but I must've read a half dozen of those Myth books when I was a kid and consumed a mass market paperback a day.

... and no poet hated himself more than Philip Larkin. He's the man who wrote:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

In a new batch of letters acquired by the British Library, Larkin laments his pasty, oblong visage as resembling "the late Stan Laurel" and "CS Lewis on a drugs charge"—and, my favorite, "an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles on."

I hate to say it, but I can see the resemblance.

It just goes to show—the worst you can think about yourself is probably true.

We're gearing up for a quiet Memorial Day weekend here in booksville.

Up at Third Place Books, we have Doug Thompson, reading from Whales: Touching the Mystery. Whale books are apparently all the rage now. I cannot endorse this book reading, though, because touching whales is, generally, a very bad idea. Do not try this at home. If there is a whale in your home, please contact the proper authorities, before touching it in an appropriate or inappropriate manner.

Author David Gilmour and his son Jessie are at Elliott Bay Book Company. When Jessie tried to drop out of high school, David told him that he could, but only if he would watch a movie a day with his father. Presumably the book deal that David got for writing The Film Club, about their experiences watching movies together, was not part of the initial deal.

The full readings calendar is over yonder.

(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? Today is a special Lunch Date. W.W. Norton took a few local booksellers, a couple of reporters, and a certain Stranger Book Editor out to the Dahlia Lounge for a lunch with Bob Spitz, the author of The Saucier's Apprentice. Spitz wrote The Beatles, the biography of, um, The Beatles, and he's reading from Apprentice at Third Place Books tonight at 7.

What'd you eat? This amazing five-course meal that wasn't on the menu.

How was the food? See the word "amazing," above. The best items, though, were at the beginning and end of the meal. Spitz made the appetizer, which was a morel and oyster mushroom tatin. The recipe is from the book, Spitz claims that it only takes ten minutes of preparation, and it's motherfucking delicious, possibly because Spitz claimed that it took "about a half pound of butter" to make. I'm going to try to make it at home, and I'll tell you if it actually takes anywhere near ten minutes to make. The dessert, which was a Dahlia original, was a cornmeal and olive oil cake with white chocolate, strawberry, and rhubarb. It was unbelievably good, fluffy, and sweet. Spitz called it one of the best desserts he'd ever eaten, and just about everybody at the table agreed with him. People should protest the Dahlia Lounge until it becomes available every day.


What does your date say about itself? Dust jacket: "The education of a barbarian in the temples of haute cuisine. In the blink of an eye, Bob Spitz turned fifty, finished an eight-year project and a fourteen-year marriage that left him nearly destitute, had his heart stolen and broken on the rebound, and sought salvation the only way he knew how. He fled to Europe, where he hopscotched among the finest cooking schools in the pursuit of his dream. The urge to cook like a virtuoso, to unravel the mysteries of the process, was too tantalizing to resist."

Is there a representative quote? "One day, dreaming of food orgies, I came across a recipe for pan-roasted cod in the New York Times Dining section and immediately grew flushed. There was something sensuous about the way it appeared on the page. What I couldn't get over was its aching simplicity, nothing more than a tiny saddle-shaped fillet dressed with a thorny sprig of thyme, looking lost and forlorn in a copper saute pan. No sauce, no vegetables, just as buck-naked innocent and provocative as the girl next door."

Will you two end up in bed together? Spitz and I will not end up in bed together, as we are both heterosexual men in committed relationships. The book and I might just end up in bed together; I'm not crazy about while male midlife change books as a rule, but I am interested in the subject matter. Spitz is more of an everyman than, say, Bill Buford, and so his food writing is a little more accessible. I know that the book and I will wind up in the kitchen together, as I'm going to try that friggin' delicious mushroom tatin, and I'm interested to see what other easy-fancy recipes are inside.

Because I made my comments quota for the month, I can dedicate my next posts to the only thing that really matters to me: philosophy. First, I will discuss Steven Shaviro's recent essay on Alfred Whitehead's God, and how that philosopher's idea of God differs from Spinoza's God. From the difference, Shaviro makes this astonishing claim: Whitehead wanted nothing less than the secularization of God. To grasp this claim, we must leave theology and travel to the realm of political philosophy. The end of that journey is an essay by Hannah Arendt: "Introduction to Politics." In that essay we will find an excellent example of the secularization of God, and how this example is related to Alain Badiou's leading concept: "the event." To understand what an event is, we shall turn to Badiou's most popular book in English, Ethics. The event, Arendt's politics, and God in Spinoza and Whitehead will be the path. The target of the posts is to show how certain theological themes and concerns can have, without the loss of their aura (in the Benjaminian sense), a place (or substance) in a world that has no God ("the age of reality") .

One of the more interesting bits of working in a used bookstore is the opportunity to make house calls to look at people's entire collections. Generally, someone has died or there's been a divorce or a major move, and people want to unload thousands of books at one time. It's a great way for a bookstore to start a collection, or to drastically change the flavor of their bookstores.

Bookride, an antiquarian book blog, is currently running a series of posts with some of the weirder book buying house calls:

A pal of mine, now ennobled, was called to a house full of books in North London. When he arrived he realised there was a noisy afternoon party going on that had developed into an orgy and he swears he had to tread on the odd buttock as he made his way to the desirable book collection.

More, including chickens, over there.

Laptop Magazine has a first look, with video, of the next generation of the One Laptop Per Child project, which is possibly due in 2010. It would be composed of two touch screens, so you can use it as a keypad. But one of the major goals of the initial OLPC was to make it an energy-efficient and, most importantly, eye-friendly e-reader. Setting the thing up to look like a book is a major deal; I'm surprised that more laptop manufacturers haven't done this.

I was intrigued by the OLPC, but I actually bought an Asus EEE as my low-budget, low-weight travel laptop instead. I have no regrets about the EEE, but it certainly isn't an e-reader. This next-generation OLPC looks like maybe the first e-reader that I would actually use from time to time, especially when traveling.

New local publisher Cryptic Bindings is a self-described "creepy little press." Their current entire list is one photo book, but this fall they're publishing On/Off, which is billed as "A Jekyll and Hyde story."

In the last decade or so, Seattle has really lost a lot of ground to Portland by way of publishing companies. There's not a lot of diversity or energy in our publishing scene, so we should keep our fingers crossed, because a boutique horror press could add a lot to our publishing diversity.

At the moment, on their website, Cryptic is unrolling a serial thriller novel. It's untitled, and there's a contest to name it. Now, I've always been a fan of the idea of serial novels--when I read Dickens I usually stop between chapters to sort of get the rhythm of how his books were initially published--and I'm a little disappointed that there's not a whole lot of this going on on the internet. Sure, the New York Times always runs a serial novel, but it feels vaguely like a throwback, as though the publishers are amused with how quaint they are. So the first five chapters of this novel are up, with a promise to publish every Monday. There are a lot of cliches, but that kind of thing is a valuable tool in the telling of serial fiction. It's hard to tell what's going to happen, or if the story is going to eventually be worth anything, but I'll gladly load the thing into my feed reader and find out.

Two open mics, a book about fishing, a mystery by a bestselling local author, and a few other events of note tonight.

Up at Third Place Books, Bob Spitz reads from The Saucier's Apprentice, which is about a writer working his way through the great culinary schools of Europe. Plus, there's a chicken on a leash on the cover. Bonus!

Nick Heil is at the Tacoma Public Library, with a book called Dark Summit, about 2006 on Mount Everest, which was the deadliest year ever for the mountain since western white folks first decided they were going to try climbing it.

And at Town Hall, Jerry White, who the press notes announce was "maimed by a landmine," and then started an organization intended to disarm landmines, will read from his new self-help book I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis. If you're going to attend a self-help book reading, I do suggest attending one hosted by a man who has overcome being maimed by a landmine. There's probably a better sense of perspective than, say, at a reading for The Secret.

Upcoming readings will be found on our readings calendar.

Last week, I started reading I Will Fear No Evil, by Robert A. Heinlein. I am reading this book because Brad bet me fifty bucks that I couldn't do it. Last week, I was 122 pages in. Now, I am on page 283. I hate this book so motherfucking much.

So far, the inordinately wealthy male businessman Johann Sebastian Bach Smith has had his brain implanted into the nubile young female body of his secretary, Eunice. Somehow, Eunice's thoughts have survived the loss of her brain, and so the two are communicating mentally via dueling parentheses, like so:

(Eunice, would you still be willing to have a baby by me?) (What? Boss, don't joke about it. Don't mock me.) (I'm not joking, beloved.)

Eunice has started referring to Johann, who now answers to Joan Eunice, as "Twin." In the last hundred and sixty pages, they have made out with a lot of men. That's just about all that they have done.

The thing that nobody told me was how goddamned slow this book is. It's never-ending. Conversations between Joan and, say, her lawyer, go on for dozens of pages, in part because Johann and Eunice also have their parenthetical commentary going on during the boring science-fiction legal talk. There's a big lawsuit for the Smith fortune, you see, and our...hero?...has to prove that he or she is who he or she says he or she is. There were two virtually identical passages where Joan convinces people that she is Johann and then they kiss. These passages, together, made up about sixty pages. This is atrocious writing. I have never wanted to quit a book more, but I'll continue because I am going to win this stupid, stupid bet.

Study questions:

4. Seriously: Where the hell was Heinlein's editor?

I'll be done with this Bookclub of the Damned--one way or the other--next Wednesday.

A Poetry Slam, a book about hiking Snohomish County, a discussion about evangelicals and liberals, and a group reading sponsored by Jack Straw Productions, as well as other readings that I am going to show you about right now.

Up at Third Place Books, Rick Bragg, author of All Over but the Shoutin', reads from the third book in his memoir trilogy, The Prince of Frogtown. Shoutin' was pretty good, but I haven't read the others. But I believe that Bragg is a good reader and should be entertaining.

At Parkplace Books out in Kirkland, John Straley, Alaska's writer laureate, reads from his new mystery, The Big Both Ways, which is a mystery set in the Northwest in the 1930s and involves Wobblies. Wobblies!

At the Central Branch of the Library, Firoozeh Dumas discusses Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of an Iranian American, at Home and Abroad. It is about the power of laughter.

And at the Sunset Tavern, Mike Edison performs, with a band, from I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World. Ari Spool is reading this at the moment and she said that the book reads the way that a bar band sounds. I am right now, even as I type, listening to the audio version of the book, which was produced by Jon Spencer and features the Rocket Train Delta Science Arkestra. It sounds like a bar band. There's even harmonica. In talking about working at Screw magazine, Edison even says that he wanted something "the way that Chief Wiggum wants a jelly donut." If you're into porn or wrestling or illicit drugs, this could be your thing, and it's at a bar, and it's free.

Look! It's the full readings calendar!

Yesterday, I was in the University District and, as I frequently do, I stopped into Magus Books. I had no particular book in mind, so I sort of bumbled around the store, checking things out.

I found a couple of Doc Savage novels that I didn't have--Hex and Brand of the Werewolf--and I checked out the comic book section and found a book that I'd read years ago and totally forgotten about: Marc Hempel's Gregory.

Gregory is a little light bulb-shaped boy who lives in a mental institution with a talking rat named Herman that continually gets killed and is reincarnated as himself. The only things that Gregory can say are "Zub," "Bim Bim Bim Bim Bim," and "I Gregory." His favorite pastime is running around his cell and screaming until he collapses. Here, from Flickr user Scott McW, is the part of the book when Gregory's straitjacket breaks and so he subsequently learns that he has arms:

This was one of my favorite comic books when I was in high school. It's so sweet, in a very wrong way. There's another copy of it at Magus for five bucks; somebody should go buy it.

Against my advice, Tori Centanni, the intrepid--and unpaid--Book Intern went to last night's James Frey reading at Town Hall. Here's what she had to say on the matter:

The turnout was sad. At 7:30 I counted 28 people, and though a few more trickled in, there were never more than 40 people in the room. This was sort of pathetic.

Frey, trying to cement his image as a rebel and a rule breaker, wore a baseball cap inside and refused to stand during his reading. He did not bring any materials and borrowed a copy of his book from a cute blonde in the front row to read from.

The whole thing was pretty subdued and uneventful. [Opening act] Josh Kilmer-Purcell read the first chapter of his novel [Candy Everybody Wants]. People laughed at the appropriate places. Frey then read a chapter from Bright Shiny Morning about a gun store and a rape victim. Then they asked for questions.

At first, people asked about Frey’s love of Los Angeles. Someone asked how he went about his research. Frey said he read a few L.A. history books and used the internet. When he couldn’t find information, he said “as I’m famous for doing, I just made it up.” He paused for laughter. “It’s a fiction book,” he added.

He talked about how The Los Angeles Times “savaged the book” and how he thought that “was awesome.” But the New York Times and Times Magazine loved it, which surprised him. There were more questions about Los Angeles. Frey really “wanted to do [it] justice.”

Finally some guy in a red shirt grew a pair and asked about The Controversy. The question was “How did you handle the controversy, how did it change your life, and are you still friends with Oprah?”

“I was never really friends with Oprah,” Frey replied. One of the things they told him the first time he was on her show was “don’t expect to be friends with her,” as though a lot of people walk onto her set and think they’re buddies.

As for the controversy regarding how true his “memoir” was, Frey said he just concentrated on his friends and family and tried to ignore the press. He admitted the debacle was “unbelievably unpleasant” but insisted he never meant for A Million Little Pieces to be taken as pure fact. “I could give a fuck about journalistic integrity,” he said, “I wanted to create literature.”

Someone asked if he thought it was unfair, since most memoirs are “fictionalized to some degree.”

Frey sort of dismissed the question by repeating it didn’t matter. “What matters to me is that people still read it… People come up to me and tell me [it] affected them…The word on the side of the book is completely, utterly meaningless to me.”

And then about a dozen people got in line to get their books signed. The whole thing only lasted an hour.

In conclusion, Tori Centanni is great and the James Frey reading was not. Less than 40 people at a Town Hall event--the upstairs, I think, seats 850 people and the downstairs seats anywhere from two to five hundred, depending on the configuration--translates to a waste of time for everyone involved.

Readings abound tonight, from the south to the north of Seattle. Things that I'm not going to discuss at length include a Nextbook-sponsored collection of stories about Jewish mothers; the paperback release of a supernatural thriller at the Seattle Public Library; Such a Pretty Fat,a new memoir "from the author of Bright Lights, Big Ass and Bitter is the New Black;" and Merle's Door, which is another motherfucking book about a 'freethinking' dog.

At Third Place Books Ravenna, which is a really nice space that I don't think I've written about before, Cory Doctorow is reading from his book Little Brother. I wrote about the book in this week's Constant Reader, and I expounded a little bit on it yesterday, too.

At the University Book Store, Andrew Sean Greer reads from his new novel, The Story of a Marriage. Anna Roth reviewed it for us:

There's a line in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, a book I read about 10 times when I was 19 and 20, that's been stuck in my head ever since. He writes that in books by Dostoyevsky, there were things "so true they changed you as you read them." For a long time that phrase became my gold standard for judging novels.

Hemingway is dangerous for young idealists for all sorts of reasons, but his emphasis on literary Truth was particularly disastrous for me. The search for "one true sentence" became my blind spot; for a good turn of phrase, I was willing to forgive major plot holes and incredible character flaws. I overlooked the fact that things may be True, but that doesn't automatically make the novel Good. A perfect example of this is The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer, a book sprinkled with profound prose that ultimately rings false.

And there are two readings at Town Hall. William H. Calvin reads from Global Fever: How to Treat Climate Change, which is fairly self-explanatory, and Arianna Huffington, of the much-linked blog The Huffington Post, will be reading from her new political book Right is Wrong. I read somewhere that The Huffington Post finally surpassed Drudge in terms of web traffic, and I think that that alone is a reason to go to this reading. There will be some self-satisfied liberal back-patting, but sometimes that's the price you pay for living in Seattle, and the interesting political analysis will hopefully more than make up for it. It's probably the best place to spend this particular primary night.

The full readings calendar will provide more information on the readings that I glossed over.

Slog tipper Rob informs me that Cory Doctorow is reading from Little Brother at All For Kids today at 4 pm today. This is true. Rob is bringing his two kids, and if you have the afternoon off, you should go, too. You'll have one more chance after today: Doctorow reads at Third Place Books tomorrow. I wrote about the book in this week's Constant Reader:

Little Brother is the story of Marcus, a 17-year-old hacker who gets secretly arrested by Homeland Security. In true young-adult-novel fashion, Marcus and his friends fight back against the theft of their freedoms.

Doctorow's prose is light and explanatory, and it's the explanations that really make the book important: Hidden inside Little Brother is a manual for civil disobedience. It has useful advice for what to do when detained by authorities; information about methods the government employs to track its own citizens; and actual, working tips on how to modify technology to maintain your anonymity. With a copy of the book and Google, it's possible for an inspired reader to scan his surroundings for miniature cameras, free his computer from spyware, and set up anonymous internet identities.

The Penguin Blog has images of their most recent British reissue of Ian Fleming's James Bond series. The covers focus on the ladies, which is probably a wise choice; I've always found Fleming's novels to be less about guns, booze, and tuxedoes (which have almost always wound up on the covers of Bond novels since the movies) and more about pitchin' woo while fighting evil.

And a Happy Bright Shiny Morning to you. There are a ton of readings in town tonight, including an open mic, a talk by local doctor Emily Transue, and a book called Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy, which kind of has the thesis in the title.

Let's discuss the Bright Shiny Elephant in the room. James Frey reads at Town Hall tonight, from his new novel Bright Shiny Morning. He is joined by Josh Kilmer-Purcell, who reads from the reissue of his book Candy Everybody Wants. Kilmer-Purcell is doing kind of an opening act thing, I guess. We didn't review Bright Shiny Morning in the paper this week--really, do you want to read another rehash of the stupid James Frey stupidness?--but Ari Spool reviewed Candy Everybody Wants, and here's the beginning of that review:

I'm going to come right out and admit this: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a gay man. Nor have I ever been a gay male teenager with a desperate hankering for fame, a trailer-trash bohemian for a mom, or a retard for a brother. Is that why I hated Candy Everybody Wants?

Fuck, no. There's so much more to hate than just the characters. There's also the plot! And the setting! And, most of all, the writing!

The rest of the review is here.

I do not recommend you go to the Frey reading. Instead, you should check out Preeta Samarasan, reading from Evening is the Whole Day at Elliott Bay Book Company, if debut novels set in Malaysia are your thing. Or--perhaps most excitingly--Nancy Kress, the author of Beggars in Spain, is reading at the Hugo House. It's a pretty great sci-fi novel, and she's going to be reading new work.

If fiction isn't your thing, Stuart Kauffman is also at Town Hall reading from Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion, which seems to posit that there is room for religion in science. I remain skeptical.

Those with questions are directed to the readings calendar.

There are absolutely no readings at all today. Instead, you should read a book.

Actually, first, you should watch this video for inspiration. And then you should read.

It's fun-damental, kids.

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

(Thanks to Slog tipper Clayton for the video.)

An open mic, a book about business for women, and a passel of other events going on today.

First of all, up at Third Place Books, Washington State Congressman Jay Inslee will be reading from Apollo's Fire, his book about clean energy. A friend of mine was just in Inslee's office and he brought me back a free, pocket-sized copy of The Constitution. He said there were just stacks of them sitting around the office. I'm ready for the battles with feverish Ron Paul supporters about what it all means, now. Thanks, Congressman Inslee!

John Straley, who is Alaska's 'writer laureate,' which must be a pretty cool job, is signing copies of his new mystery, The Big Both Ways, at Seattle Mystery Bookshop.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, Philip Terman reads from his new poetry collection, Rabbis of the Air, a book which begins with a poem titled: "As My Daughter Climbs the Apple Tree, I Think of the Ancient Sephardic Poet Jehuda Halevi." This should win some kind of award for the title alone.

And at the Rendezvous, Antioch University's KNOCK magazine celebrates the release of their brand-new Gestation Issue. I have never read KNOCK, and so I have nothing to say on the matter. But Christopher Frizzelle did, a couple years ago:

As has been said in this space repeatedly in the last few weeks, there are no great literary journals in Seattle, but I am nothing if not an optimist, which is how I ended up at the Rendezvous's JewelBox Theater on Sunday evening. I was invited to the reading of the new issue of KNOCK by KNOCK's editor, Bryan Tomasovich, who began a long e-mail to me with, "Hey, this is about your recent articles about literary magazines in Seattle, and the reactions to [your articles], but I'm not writing to give you shit or any such." Tomasovich gave me the details of the event ("Starts at 6:30 p.m. with a great, seven-piece jazz/funk band... Then we kick in with readings and performances from our local contributors...") and wrote, "And I'd like to see you there 'cause I've not met you, 'cause you seemingly don't even know about KNOCK (or you do and are discounting us), and 'cause just maybe if you get to know what we're up to, you might be able to help KNOCK grow into the kind of magazine you're seeking, based on what I'm hearing in your articles."

Don't forget to check out the full readings calendar.

Since every book has to have a trailer now, the paperback release of Head Case by Dennis Cass has a trailer about having a trailer. Beside the seizure-inducing edit job on this one, it's pretty funny.

Studs Terkel turned 96 today. If you've never read Terkel's oral biographies, start with Working--it's available at just about every used bookstore in the city, for super-cheap--and then read everything else. He's among the last of a breed--I will always regret never being able to meet Mike Royko--of talented journalists who brought real heart to their work.

Plus, his name is Studs. And he's 96. That alone is cause for celebration.