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Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Books Reading Tonight: Shame and Glory

Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 10:22 AM

The Bellevue Regional Library hosts Joan Green Byrd. Calamity is subtitled The Heppner Flood of 1903. It's about a two-story (!) wall of water that struck the town of Hapner. Um, in 1903.

Joel Kotkin reads at Town Hall tonight. The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 is a book that opens with a chapter pointing out how previous books like The Population Bomb that speculate about population growth are dumb. Then it proceeds to speculate about population growth. I found it really hard to get into this book, and I wound up abandoning it because it all just felt like pointless speculation to me, even though Mr. Kotkin is a "Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures."

The Salon of Shame is tonight. If you know what the Salon of Shame is, you're probably going to this. If you're not aware what Salon of Shame is, it'll still sell out.

And Third Place Books is hosting the 2010 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award Winners. This year's PNBA Awards—Timothy Egan, Jack Nisbet, Cherie Priest, Naseem Rakha, Cynthia Rylant and Nikki McClure—will be here to sign your books or chat with you. With refreshments! There's very seldom an opportunity to actually just chat with authors in an informal setting without a Q&A session involved, so I'm going to call this the reading of the night. I can state from experience that Cherie Priest is very friendly; go tell her how much you loved Boneshaker.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here. And if you're planning on staying in and you're looking for personalized book recommendations, feel free to tell me the books you like and ask me what to read next over at Questionland.

Comments (3) RSS

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Warning about Joel Kotkin. The guy is to exurban sprawl and automobile-dependent development as Dick Cheney is to enhanced interrogation techniques and secret prisons. If Kemper Freeman were to start a think tank, Joel Kotkin is the first intellectual he'd try to hire.

If you have the least bit of affinity for transit and cities, do not enrich Kotkin with one dime of your money.

Posted by cressona on February 16, 2010 at 10:43 AM

That should be Joann (not Joan) Byrd. Formerly the editorial page editor at the P-I; also late of the Washington Post.

Posted by bigyaz on February 16, 2010 at 10:50 AM

Paul...I've been trying and trying to like Boneshaker. Wil Wheaton blurbed it and I STILL can't make myself like it. I love the idea of the story, but I just cannot get over how slowly the prose moves, or how generic (even with the steampunk accoutrements) the characters seem. It reads like a too-detailed movie pitch, like the story was intended to be told in a visual medium but woke up one morning as a book instead and just decided to go with it.

I almost never don't finish books...but I'm about halfway through and I'm giving up on this one.

I'm very glad to hear that Cherie Priest is friendly, though. I'm glad for her that other people like her book.

Posted by brinsonian on February 16, 2010 at 2:35 PM