• Always one of the best posts of the year, The Millions looks at the most anticipated books of 2010.  The list includes new work by Joshua Ferris, Sam Lipsyte, Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan and more.

• At Good, Anne Trubek recounts the literary decade that was.  This is great post, though it doesn’t touch on one of the worst trends of the Aughts:  the steady and increasing closure of independent bookstores.

• If one of your resolutions for 2010 is to read more, you might want to get in on the hottest new thing — the reading retreat.  Organized by the talented Michele Filgate of RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH, the Reader’s Retreat is exactly what it sounds like:  four days in a spa-like retreat where all you do is read.  There are a few other activities planned, but the gist is that you take a break from your manic life to read a few books.  It sounds heavenly, doesn’t it?

• Lastly, I must point out that our 2010 event lineup kicks off tonight.  Check out the fabulous slate of events we have coming up in January and February.  Tickets are now on sale for our three ticketed events (Jasper Fforde, Daniel Pink and Elizabeth Gilbert), so don’t miss out.

Is this sort of collaborative or social reading the future?  At the moment, the consensus seems to be that the future of ereading lies not in browser-based reading experiences (ie, any platform that requires you to read on a computer) but rather in handheld devices like the iPhone or the Sony Reader.  It’s clear, though, that this sort of browser-based reading experiment might provide a way of creating real communities around books and around something most of us have considered a solitary activity — reading.  While I enjoy reading a novel without interruption or commentary, the case is different for non-fiction books.  I might like the option of seeing more indepth examples than an editor thought appropriate to include.  Imagine further if those examples came from other scholars on the subject.

Take, for example, Kaya Oakes great new book Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture, the book I’m currently reading and enjoying.  Oakes’s book is 210 pages with notes, and while I think it’s more than enough for the average reader, I find myself wanting to know more about specific anecdotes or people mentioned in the book.  If I were reading the book on a Book Glutton-like system, I might be able to put a note up asking for more information on those subjects.  Oakes herself might be able to respond, but even if she chose not to, someone else might.  Maybe another author like Michael Azerrad might weigh in with further thoughts on what made The Minutemen and SST Records so unique.  Or maybe Mike Watt himself would drop in an anecdote or quote that didn’t make it into the book.  It’s this kind of possibility — the possibility for a real network or readers to make the act of reading the book more informative and more enriching — that really excites me about Book Glutton.

Don’t get me wrong:  I love the solitude of reading.  As a culture, we’re not getting anywhere near enough solitude or time for contemplation.  And I’m not arguing that the form of the book change all that much.  I think authors need an endpoint, a place where the book is done.  I see everything happening after that as being at the impetus of the reader.  I suppose I see this kind of reading experience as somehow supplementary to what we now think of as reading, something extra for people who want or need more.

Vroman’s will be hosting Sarah Dunant at All Saints Church on Wednesday, July 22.  Two tickets are free with purchase of the book which will be released tomorrow (If you don’t want to purchase a book, tickets are $5 a piece).

Alice Hoffman will be at Vroman’s on Friday, June 12 at 7 p.m. to discuss and sign The Story Sisters.  We hope you’ll join us.

“It was April in New York City and from the window of their room at the Plaza Hotel everything looked bright and green.  The Story sisters were sharing a room on the evening of their grandparents’ fiftieth anniversary party.  Their mother trusted them completely.  They were not the sort of teenagers who would steal from the minibar only to wind up drunk in the hallway, sprawled out on the carpet or nodding off in a doorway, embarrassing themselves and their families.  They would never hang out the window to wave away cigarette smoke or toss water balloons onto unsuspecting pedestrians below. They were diligent, beautiful girls, well behaved, thoughtful.  Most people were charmed to discover that the girls had a private, shared language.  It was lovely to hear, musical.  When they spoke to each other, they sounded like birds.”

[NOTE:  Due to some technical issues, the audio levels are not consistent.  I apologize for this.  I recommend keeping the volume low on the introduction, as the actual interview is quite a bit louder.]
Click here to download the podcast as an mp3.

I am delighted and terrified to contribute to the Vroman’s blog.  I’m not someone to whom this form comes naturally – my first impulses are generally the small fish one chucks back into the stream with the admonition to mature, pronto.  But I thought this might be a chance to throw back a certain curtain and show off some gears and levers that I haven’t exposed before.

When I was a little kid, about seven or eight years old, I read Dick Cavett’s autobiography four times, and — I’m sorry, does that require some explanation?  Well…I liked Dick Cavett.  He seemed smart.  Anyway, I recall him describing his work habits: he would start typing something, drop his white-out under the desk accidentally, find a magazine from 1963 and six hours later realize he’d been reading articles on snowshoes instead of working.

I thought this sounded grand, apparently, as it’s exactly how I work now, except for “magazines” substitute “internet,” a word far more seductive and dangerous.  I was made for the tangent.  Would I rather work or look at 6000 photographs of cats sitting in sinks?

http://www.catsinsinks.com/

I mean, no contest, right?  This is why I don’t have a website.  Rather: as the guy who loves websites, I would want my website to provide news updated from the biochip in my forehead, a twitter stream that roars entirely in epigrams, a gallery of myself and my many friends and enemies clinking flutes of prosecco, a constantly updated bibliography (such as the latest bit of adequacy: http://tinyurl.com/oxsjhg), links to people with whom I have started feuds, a forum to keep those feuds going, flash graphics showing me triumphing over enemies and various haircuts, invitations to many parties I would have to throw, clips of said parties and the feuds they enflamed on YouTube, research reference photographs, contests, games involving funny hats, and massages and free balloons for everyone who might visit.

The upshot is that this is my actual website:

http://glendavidgold.com/

This took forever to design.  Really.  I sweated that “us.”  As if there were a small squad of young, earnest people wearing t-shirts with post-post ironic phrases and non-ironic images of cats in sinks, sitting around a large oak table with laptops humming, listening to their iPods, ready to direct the incoming emails to the proper apparachniks.   Also, you’ll note that the background is white.  I thought that was classy.

If I didn’t have the website I do, if I did put any time in on it, if I goofed off — self-promoted?  networked? communicated with people who were interested in my work? put my lips to the screen like a squirrel looking for syrup? — on the net, I wouldn’t have written Sunnyside.

The problem for me is that the net is a great democracy.  Everything is equally important, and soon I can’t tell if looking at the detailed breakdown of a medieval crossbow, upon which part of my novel hinges, is more or less interesting than a naked, out of shape guy haltingly playing “Major Tom” on the guitar.  Here, you decide:

a) Crossbow: http://www.thebeckoning.com/medieval/crossbow/xbow-def.html

b) Naked guy (warning, not work safe.  Really, really.):  http://tinyurl.com/annpya

So, I’m betting you like myself are more compelled by that naked guy.  God bless him.  I have no idea why he thought it was a good idea to put his flesh up there for all the world to see and to judge him while he wrestled aloud with abilities that though heartfelt were arguably just beyond the tips of his fingers.

Which leads me to why I don’t blog.  I love bloggers.  But for me, the first draft I write is for myself and the subsequent drafts are my attempt to invite the world in.  Revision is my friend, and, if you like my work, it’s yours, too.  At best my early thoughts are perhaps 35% good and 30% stupid and 35% boring.  Which I originally typed as “bloring,” which might be more accurate.

But.

Sunnyside, my novel, is a big book that takes a ton of narrative chances.  It’s about, among other things, artistic intent (in this case Chaplin’s) and how it can get derailed.  There were times where I wasn’t juggling 100 balls in the air — I was juggling none.  There was a strange absence when I sat down to write, a loneliness that bugged me.  In August 2007 I was deep, deep into my manuscript and I needed the feeling of communicating to the outside world.  Transitional objects, teddy bears, things invested with manna fascinate me, and my blog became my transitional object.  Here is my first month of posting, which I meant from the bottom of my heart:

http://glendavidgold.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html

By September it looked like this:

http://glendavidgold.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

I think I told two or three people that the posts existed.  A handful of other people seem to have stumbled there themselves.

It’s a page count, of course.  Blogging was keeping me honest.  And it gave me a goal.  Finish the damned thing.  Which I did right here:

http://glendavidgold.blogspot.com/2007/11/1282_08.html

(As you can see, I had sold out and added visual aids by then.)

I started editing down (which led to cryptic notations indication what page I had read to, what page I had edited to, and how long the manuscript was).  I was also leaving myself notes so that I would later remember and understand what had once been bothering me.

http://glendavidgold.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html

I was wrestling darkly with what it meant to edit something.  Every day brought a new challenge, and having it memorialized in that in-between place where readers who knew about the blog (I think 12 people seem to have known about it) could see the progress meant something to me like tossing salt over my shoulder.  Mostly it was for me a diary I didn’t mind sharing, about a book no one had seen, which rendered things like this opaque:

http://glendavidgold.blogspot.com/2008/01/1144_27.html

Sort of.  It turns out that there was just enough inference in there that even if people didn’t know the book I was referring to, my shouts were in a common language.  A couple of people figured it out quickly and kept me posted in response.  It was a nice communal hiding place.

And a hiding place no longer.  I figure now that the book is unveiled, if you actually read Sunnyside (my vote?  Yes.  Yes, you should) and you’re interested in process, check out the blog and see what it was like to write.  I have spoken against “director’s cuts” of novels, so you will never see Tatiana the Witch whom I refer to early on, nor the benshi, but you’ll see signs of mourning upon their excision.

I realize something now: I kept rereading Dick Cavett because I wanted to know what it was like when he was under the desk, not making stuff up, but in that place between dreaming and writing, perhaps wasting time, perhaps letting things stew.  Of course that wasn’t there in print.  But now it is, sort of, for me.

So there you go.  I genuinely don’t know if it’s helpful to see my own process questions laid out like that, but I hope it is.  Even Dick Cavett has a blog now.  Maybe someday he’ll spill.

Click here to view the embedded video.

• Beatrice has, I think, the first of what will be many, many interviews with Emily St. John Mandel, author of the terrific debut novel Last Night in Montreal.  You’ll be hearing a great deal about this book in the weeks to come, so you should probably just go ahead and read it now.  It’s great.  I recommend it, and you can pre-order it here. And if you’re in New York and you’re not Mercantile Library (17 E 47th St) this Wednesday night at 7 p.m. to hear Emily read, you’re crazy…or, you know, busy.

• Here’s an apropos of nothing plug for two sites I enjoy but don’t mention all that often:  Three Percent is “a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester.”  It’s also frequently a great read on issues relating, in a more general way, to the book business.  Identity Theory is a “literary website, sort of.”  It features interviews with authors, artists and musicians.  Right now they have interviews with Yiyun Li and Monrovia’s finest, Klum.

• Did I mention that we are hosting Seth Grahame-Smith, author of the runaway bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this Saturday at our store? I did now.  No excuses, Pasadena.

• Dan Brown’s new book, which I mentioned in a previous post, will be about the end of the Mayan calendar.  I think this will test a theory of mine:  namely, that The DaVinci Code was successful, at least in part, because of its religious content.  Add to that the fact that this book will be about a Central American culture, and not a European one, and I think we’ll see this book sell a bit less than his previous two.  Just a theory (and I’m sure others have had this theory, too.  I’m not actually claiming I’m the originator of said theory).  I’m happy to be proven wrong.
• The Millions is concerned with the future of book criticism.  So concerned, in fact, that they’re running a three-part series on it.  Parts 1 and 2 are already up.
• Kate Christensen on the book Wetlands, which is apparently very big in Germany:  I just learned from a friend as I was whining about how much I can’t finish Wetlands that there are hugging cafes in Berlin where lonely people go to be hugged by strangers who are there for the same purpose; have you all heard of this already? I have a feeling that the popularity of this weird, pathetic, babyish fad dovetails somehow with the runaway success of this book over there, people allegedly fainting in readings, how many copies sold? Thanks to Julie for the link.  Oh, and have I mentioned that Kate will be at Vroman’s on June 29? I have now.
• Ever since I saw Adventureland, I’ve been on a major Replacements kick.  As such, check out this awesome outtake version of Can’t Hardly Wait:  
  Can’t Hardly Wait [Outtake – A…

  And while you are at it, read Gillian’s review of the film:  I was planning on including a paragraph here about how the female characters were all somewhat detestable, but that really wasn’t the case, I think I just want it to be.  Actually, Em is probably the most complex character in the film and even though she does make poor choices and behave irrationally at moments, that is easily attributable to the fact that she is human, not that she is a woman.  This can often be a problem with feminist theorizing: it can backfire and have you (me) end up demonizing women instead of…you know, not doing that which is the whole point.

• There’s lots of internet chatter about this ebook article in the Wall Street Journal online by Steven Johnson.  The short summary is that he’s pretty impressed with ebooks and thinks they represent the biggest thing to happen to publishing since the printing press.  Normally, this is the kind of article I would unpack and examine and respond to with some analyses of my own, but, well, I’m super busy today.  So Steven Johnson gets a pass.  (I will take issue with this, though:  “Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.”  This rhetoric of the internet being about communicating with people in far-flung places has got to stop.  The internet, it seems to me, is fundamentally local.  You talk to the same people online that you talk to in everyday life.  I talk to my wife online dozens of times a day.  I have a friend who moved to Barcelona last year.  When he lived in LA, we talked on Facebook with some regularity.  Now he lives in Barcelona, and we talk with less regularity.  Some of this is because I’m a bad friend, and I suffer from major out-of-sight, out-of-mind syndrome, but it’s also because I’ve found that Facebook and Twitter and blogging are all excellent supplements to my physical world.  In other words, the internet isn’t a separate place.  I’ve fallen victim to this thinking before, and I’m determined now to stop.  Let’s all stop.)  Read Rich’s post in response to Johnson’s.