Can You Sign It "To My Best Friend For Ever and Ever?"

Wherein the Writer briefly discusses the Pastime of Book Collecting,  tells of the Signed Editions he owns along with their Stories, and illuminates his Progress in his current Book Reading Project

I don't consider myself a book collector - I'm a reader. Its the reading that really matters.

But . . . you know, its books. They rule. You want to have your favorites in arm's reach at all times. You want funky old editions, and beautiful new editions, and hard-working books full of highlighting and scribbled marginalia.

And, when the opportunity comes up, yes indeed you would love for an author to sign one to you personally. Get the autograph and a book becomes an artifact just like that.

Over the years I have managed to get a few editions signed and I thought I would post pics and tell their stories here.

Bag of Bones, Stephen King

With best wishes, Stephen King

Amazon.com was the best day job I ever had, bar none. 

The coolest bit of my day-to-day at Amazon.com? Why, stocking the Free Book Shelf, of course.

See, a huge outfit like Amazon winds up with more review copies of each and every kind of book then they knew what to do with. I'm talking hundreds a month in every category. So they put a Free Book Shelf out and let folks just take what they want. I'll take that over a dental plan any day of the week.

Without getting into any details, part of my job was going to the The Magical Place where these books were, boxing them up, and hand-trucking them out to the free shelf.

I will not insult your intelligence, dear reader, by belaboring the fact that many, many, of these books never quite made it to the free shelf. I know we are tracking.

Now mind you, the most popular books never even made it to my hand truck. The People of the Magic Place kept those for themselves, as befits their place in the hierarchy.  

One day I went to The Magical Place, and what had arrived but the review copies of the new Steven King, Bag of Bones. Most of the People of the Magic Place were amongst the legion of Stephen King haters. Hate or no, these books were Precious and were not ever, ever,  going to the fabled land of the Free Book Shelf.

So I just up and asked for one. After a bit of book snob derision, they let me have one.

Score! I read it that weekend. Not my favorite SK, but a cracking good read, moody and sad and touching.

A few months later Steve himself came to Amazon.com to promote Bag of Bones. Amazon does this thing where they will have authors sign 50 books or so, and then they just send the signed books down to the warehouse. If you order a book on the right day - bam!, you have a signed copy at no extra cost. A wonderful surprise, I'm sure you would agree. I don't know if signed editions are even a priority these days since Amazon became the internet everything store, but it sure would be a shame if they stopped.

I couldn't get myself an invite to the actual signing room, but a co-worker buddy of mine did and I gave him my copy to get signed. Oh, and I planted myself outside the door to try to hear what went on, but I could barely make anything out.

By all accounts Stephen King was super nice and quite funny.

Stardust, Neil Gaiman

"Sun, Moon, and Stars"  Could he be any cooler?

Same situation. Neil Gaiman came to the Amazon office to sign copies of his new release, Stardust. This time I did make it in the room, and got to tell him how much I loved Sandman, especially Issue 75 which I believed and still do believe is the best single issue in comics. That was bursting out of my brain, and I geeked it right out.

Mr. Gaiman could not have been cooler. 

Truth Until Paradox, Various

Two friends of mine were included in the Truth Until Paradox collection, a group of stories all set in White Wolf Publishing's Mage: The Ascension universe.

"You're really not such a bad guy . . " So I've got that going for me. 

Brett Brooks, writer, photographer, gourmet chef, and all around super cool guy signed my favorite Mage story ever, Waiting for Yesterday, along with . . .

"Best wishes to one of my favorite Marauders!" That can go on my tombstone. 

. . . and James A. Moore, the biggest author I personally know. Also, the biggest author ever to whip an empty coke bottle at my head. True story.

Both good guys, both great gamers, both folks I am proud to call friends.

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

This should have read: Next time try reading the book and you won't sound like an imbecile during Q and A. 

Ernest J. Gaines came to Loyola University during my two year stint there and spoke to one of my Lit classes about his classic work, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Total class act. We had not known in advance that he was visiting; consequently, none of us had a copy of the book until like five minutes before he showed up. My eighteen year old self had never even heard of him, to my shame. Mr. Gaines was super patient with the class, even as we all struggled to come up with intelligent sounding questions about a book most of us had never so much as held.

I wound up reading this exact copy the summer after my freshman year in college, during my cross-country "camping" trip. Excellent, eye-opening, and painful.

The Dungeon Bastard's Guide to Traps

Oh yeah, you FRPG folks do not need me to tell you about The Dungeon Bastard. For you decent, normal folks: The Dungeon Bastard is a comedy adventure coach, helping would-be Fantasy Role-Playing gamers be all that they can possibly be. The Dungeon Bastard's Guide to Traps is a comic Check him out on YouTube - f you are into old-school tabletop at all you'll love him. He signed this for me at GenCon 2013. Total Bastard, blessed be of Odin and Thor.

Currently Reading

As She Climbed Across The Table, by Jonathan Lethem. 

Another book that made the journey from Athens. I always thought this was a cool title, and I finally picked it up off the shelf last week. I have to admit - fiction about academia can be a real turn off for me. But this is a fun, sci-fi story about heartbreak and what may be a new conflict under the sun, man versus artificially created space/ time singularity in the ultimate arena: love! Jonathan Lethem writes good paragraphs.  As She Climbed Across The Table is officially tickling my Doctor Who spot - the Doctor should show up and shut the whole thing down there at the end, saving the day and teaching the two mortal love birds that sometimes everything you have always wanted has been right there beside you the whole time. And with that sentence I have hopefully put to rest any of your concerns that perhaps I was not, as you might have already suspected, a huge geek.

Current Audio Book

 

The Teaching Company: Art of Reading

This is an audio re-read. I first borrowed it on CD from the Athens GA library, but I finally downloaded it from Audible dot com. I don't always see eye to eye with Professor Spurgin, but I love that he discusses reading as an art form, and some of the vocabulary I've learned has proved invaluable in discussing certain aspects of reading. This is worth your time. See if you can get it from your library!

So Enough About Me . . . What Are You Reading? 

And how is it treating you? Leave it in the comments below. Can't wait to hear from you!

The Great Salem Book MIgration

Wherein the Writer describes the State of the family Book Collection before his Cross Country move, and the purging, packing, and moving of same; A Plan for Reading; A sort of Mission Statement

So last month the missus and I moved from Athens GA to Salem MA.

It was a great big move, a real undertaking. One of the major factors was, of course, the Books.

When my wife and I moved in together it meant uniting our two collections. She is a Lit major with the same kind of voracious reading appetite that I have. She is a scientist, and scientists need to own many cyclopean volumes with names like "The Cell" or "Studies in Genetics." Not enough this, my love knits and sews, and has books of patterns and the like. She brought a whole lot of books with her when she moved in.

I, also, was the owner of many, many books. I am a serious reader who tends to attract books. I am also a role playing game enthusiast and designer, and that means tons of books (when it was time to move, I had a banker's box full of just my 2nd Edition D&D books - and I haven't played 2nd Ed. in more than a decade.).

So we moved in together. And over the years more and more books joined the ranks, as books do. Plenty of fiction, of course, but also a lot of cook books - the missus and I both love to cook, and over the years folks have gifted us with many fantastic cookbooks, particularly by Mark Bittman who is, in this writer's humble opinion,  the great master of home cooking. But also the usual gallimaufry that you would expect that two hard core geeks would gather over the years. New novels that we had to have. Geek TV series companions. Con swag RPG books. My small but beloved collection of Don Martin paperbacks.

While I hate to drop technical terms in this blog for fear I might I confuse or intimidate readers, I am confident in saying that in the years the missus and I lived on Inglewood Avenue we picked up books out the yin yang.

(And don't get me started on the notebook situation. Should I do a writer's blog? I think not but you never know . . .)

And then, eight years after I carried the first box of Lori's 18th Century novels over my threshold, it was time for us to move to Salem, Massachusetts.

So We Had To Move The Books

 

How many books did we even own back then? I have no exact idea. We had bookshelves in every room, a row of books in each bathroom, a huge collection in our kitchen. Easier to measure them in yards than count individual volumes. I would venture to guess that if you lined all of our pre-purge books up on a single shelf we would have had about between eighteen and twenty yards of books. Not a lot if you are a rich cat with a home library designed to impress other rich cats. Rather a lot for two such as we, not rich, not collectors. Just in love with books, the both of us.

We purged. I love books; paradoxically, I'm not one of those folks that needs to own a lot of stuff. I cheerfully gave away lots of books before I left. I gave two of my gaming buddies so many books each that I am sure they will prove burdensome at some point. A friend of a friend, a big Scott who owned a truck, helped my buddy pick up a bed, and took home a gratis copy of The Age of Spiritual Machines for his troubles. I sold a few books online, and even scored big a few times (some of Lori's old science books sold for fifty and sixty bucks. Ka ching!). The nine year old daughter of a friend of mine got a treasure trove - all of the Harry Potters, most of the Discworlds, and assorted other age appropriate and wonderful tomes. We donated some to the library, some we just put in the pile of free stuff we kept refilling as we got ready for the moving van.

I would say that we managed to purge about half the books we owned. I am proud of our effort but it still left us with what would be many, many boxes of books.

Of the remainders, the majority of my gaming books (pretty much the rules to all of the games I am not currently either playing or writing adventure's for) were boxed up and are currently living a quiet existence in my mother's basement. I plan on mailing a few to myself every time we go for a visit. I don't ever want to loose them, but they weren't "mission critical."

The rest were packed up, put in the back of an expensive truck that ate gas like me indulging myself at an all-you-can-eat celebration of pancakes, housed in a tiny and cramped and inconvenient yet somehow breathtakingly pricy storage space in Boston, moved by two reasonably priced movers from Boston to Salem, and were finally unpacked in their new home.

The Reading Plan

 

I think that the idea hit me once we had actually assembled a few bookshelves and shelved a few books.

I was drinking coffee and planning a day of hunting for a day-job, unpacking, and writing. I drank coffee and scanned the books on the big shelf in our new living room, like you do.

Read that one. Never read that one. Read those two. Got to get to that one! Tried that one, hated it. Intimidated by that one. 

And on and on. It struck me how many of our collective books I had never read. Not books I was disinterested in, just books I had yet to get to. There are enough brilliant books in our wide wonderful world that if you could somehow read one every day you would never run out. Mind you, that's just the brilliant ones, just the ones that would change your life to read. Add to that the excellent books, the great books, the corking good reads, the fine but flawed books that you are glad you finished. . . you get the picture.

So you make decisions. You can't get to them all. Especially if you are like myself, and have a select few books that you read, oh I dunno, lets say every year without fail. That takes up reading time as well.

We will get to my Annual Reads problem on some later post. Swearsies.

So it wasn't anything against most of the books we had . . .I just hadn't gotten around to them yet.

But I had paid a bunch of money, driven many a weary mile in what was admittedly the most comfortable Uhaul I ever drove, and sweated a lot of sweat to get those particular books to Salem.

So I decided that I will try to read all the books in the house I haven't read yet before I buy any more.

I have to break that last statement down a bit so we all know the rules.

• By "try to read," I mean give them a serious try. Even if I am not getting immediate traction I'll try to get at least a few chapters in before putting them down. Life is too short to finish books that I just plain don't like after I give it some real effort.
• By "books," I mean fiction and non-fiction that we have on our shelves and I haven't read yet. No reference books, cookbooks, knitting pattern books, etc. This isn't some kind of goof troop endurance test, so I'm not reading dictionaries, episode guides, phone books, etc.
• By "before I buy any more" I am clearly lying. It would take years to actually read everything in the house if I am being honest about really giving it a try, and the chances of me not getting any more books before I accomplish this is less than zero. To wit - I have actually already broken this prohibition yesterday when I bought two George Elliot novles as a gift for the missus. 

And by "gift," I mean books I bought to read myself that my wife will or won't read as she pleases, no skin of my nose

This is the kind of impossible goal I really like giving myself.

Early Effort

Not the cover of my edition but close enough for garden work

That day I decided I needed a victory to kick things off. I mean, eventually I am going to have to get to some of the missus's real heavy hitters: The Crying of Lot 49. Ulysses.  Not to mention the James Earl Jones autobiography that somehow has lived on my shelf since Seattle. It was time to kick it off with something a bit less rigorous.

So I picked up Being There by Jerzy Kosinski. Not even fair. It's a tiny volume and I had seen the movie. I read it in two days, mostly over coffee in the park across from my apartment. But, its a book I have always wanted to read and there you go.

And it just happens to be excellent. I don't pretend to have a perfect understanding of existentialism (or any at all - every discussion of existentialism my genius wife and I have begins with her gently saying, "well, that's not really what existentialism is, hon . . . "), but I absolutely get the same feeling about Kosinski's charming Chance as I do about Meursault from Camus's The Stranger. Here is a man who, while not being a philosopher in the modern sense of the scholarly explorer of human existence, has a deep intuitive understanding of life that includes death but not a fear of death. The book makes Chance's journey even more unbelievable than the movie, but it's fun and thought provoking satire. A real work to be admired.

Up next - I don't exactly know but I am considering The Liar by Stephen Fry.

Why Write This Blog

It's not to brag. It's not to keep score. And while I am going to review books a little, this is not a book review blog. This is an account of my delightful addiction, closer to Zoo Station than GoodReads.

I write this blog to share my love of reading. Reading is one of the three magic bullets I have discovered in my life, by which I mean an activity that is not only enjoyable to do, but that adds to the quality of your life way out of proportion to the effort you put into it.

(For the curious, the other magic bullets are exercise, specifically running and weight training, and learning to play an instrument. There are probably more magic bullets out there - be on the lookout!)

I want everybody to read, to always be happily making their way through a novel or a non-fiction or a collection of short stories or poems. I want to sit and have book discussions with friends and family and strangers.  I want everyone to be happy and so I want everyone to be readers.

I write this blog to do something with my feelings about reading. I get super emotional about the books I am into, and often just feel the need to get those all feelings out. One of the reasons I am not really going to do reviews here is because my affection for books makes it hard for me to be critical. It would be like Judge Judy having a blog where she reviewed her grand-kids.

 I would subscribe to that blog.

Everything I listed above are real reasons to write a reading blog, and they were all factors in my decision to do so. However, deciding to read all the books I brought up from Athens was the final kicker.

I have never had a formalized reading plan before, I never really even thought about it until Joe Hill talked about his yearly reading plan on Twitter.

I've been following Joe Hill's twitter feed for a while now. I like his style. At one point he wrote that he had made a plan to read a certain number of books in a year - was it as many as 50? I tried to find the post, was going to screen cap and share it here but its taking damn forever so I'm blowing it off.

The very idea that a writer I respect (if you dig horror you must - MUST - read Heart Shaped Box and Nos4a2) made a formal plan to read books first made me super curious, then inspired me. Curious first - is 50 a lot of books to read in a year? Have I read 50 books in the last 365 days? Is he counting bathroom novels and yearly re-reads? And then I was inspired. If it matters to you, yeah sure make a plan. Why not?

I think the blog will make me stick to my reading plan and, yes, help me keep score.

If you are keeping count you will note I have now admitted two fairly big lies in this post. Please excuse me while I remove my pants. They are, indeed, on fire.

Currently Reading

Still reading Joyland and A Passage to India. I am fully invested in both. Watch this space!