In which our blogger discovers one of her favorite authors

I love going to my friend Katja Seven's house. Aside from the fact that we have known each other for decades and make stupid jokes that no one else will laugh at but we know are incredibly funny anyway, she is my own personal lending library. She is a voracious reader, and usually when I stop by I leave with a pile of books. The downside to this is that I have a bit of a Paul Masson approach to books - I buy (or borrow) a ton, and most of them sit on a shelf until such time as they tell me they are ready to be read. Divining the proper time to read a book can take a tedious amount of time - I still have a Marge Piercy book on my shelf I got well over a decade ago. So probably 2+ years ago I arrived home laden with tomes, including one called The Intuitionist. Katja had kind of described it to me - something about elevators?, yadda yadda, doesn't sound that great but you liked it ok I'll take it, etc. - but as usual it ended up on an obscure shelf next to my bed.
Fast forward to June 2010. I turned in early one Friday night, wanting to start a new book. I decided to peruse the piles I'd overlooked for so long and picked up The Intuitionist. It was time. I flipped open the book and was propelled into an unexpected tale that drew me in so fast that the last thing I remember thinking before I fell asleep was to look up the author in the morning to see if he'd ever written anything else. Catchy name - Colson Whitehead.

In the morning I got up and did a search for him and found this. It was Saturday, June 19th.

Fortunately for me, Whitehead was doing a second reading in the area that very night - at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park. I should point out here that Elliott Bay Books is about 6 blocks from my house, and Lake Forest Park is... somewhere outside the City of Seattle that carless people like me aren't likely to go. But I was so inspired by the 30 pages of this book that I figured out how to get to Third Place Books by bus (not that hard! who knew?) and trucked it out to hear the guy read from not the book I was so enthralled by.

The reading itself was an adventure - it included excerpts from his current novel, Sag Harbor, and some general storytelling related to the book's subject. Halfway through, Whitehead stopped cold - part of his papers were missing. He rifled through his materials and his bag, then excused himself and went flying around the store looking for the lost notes. He returned, flustered, empty handed, said nothing like that had ever happened to him before, then got right back to business and winged it. The man has such a way of crafting language that I'm sure the loss of a script he'd prepared was daunting, but he's also such a good storyteller that we were all putty in his hands anyway.

All this is to say that I freakin love Colson Whitehead, and you can bet I will be there on Thursday when the Stranger hosts him as part of their Verse Chapter Verse series reading from his new novel Zone One. Of course, zombies are the new vampire*, but Whitehead's alternate universes are so masterfully created I expect this to easily transcend the trend. And I'm grateful to know about it ahead of time so I can just saunter over to Chop Suey after work.

In other favorite author news, tonight Elliott Bay Books will be staying open late in order to sell copies of the new english translation of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 starting at midnight. In the post-Harry Potter world I'm glad there are still some opportunities for book fans to geek out. Is it too much to ask if there will be theme cupcakes?

ETA: woke up Tuesday to find this on the Comics Curmudgeon blog. Did I not say that zombies were the new vampire?!?

Six Chix comic from Oct 25th 2011

Silent reading...now with music!

In case you haven't noticed, summer is officially over, but there is a silver lining to that looming cumulus...the return of the first Wednesday reading party at the Sorrento. Created by The Stranger's Christopher Frizzelle in collaboration with Night School, and curated by Michael Hebb*, the reading party began as a way for readers to get out and live a little...while leaving their noses firmly entrenched in their gorgeous, captivating tomes. As someone who's been "hem hemmed" at Café Presse and other nearby watering holes for having the audacity to want to read in a bar, the idea of an evening devoted to me and my fellow bookworms is pure heaven. The addition of guest stars is a wee bit off-putting - making it more of a hipster happening than a true party for book nerds - and I'm not sure if the live cello music will be a pleasant background or totally distracting, but I have high hopes that the shark has not been jumped on this event. Come on down and join the party! Just keep your voice down, will ya?

Oh, and I'll be the one reading Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape.

"Silent" reading party listing on Slog






*this is starting to sound like the credits on a hip hop record...

Go see the film The Hedgehog. Do it now! or at least by Oct 6...

I am behind on posting about some events I saw in New York last week, but I had to get this recommendation up fast.

A friend called me yesterday to ask if I wanted to go see a film about a little girl who plans to commit suicide - but then "complications ensue". That pretty much sums up the plot of The Hedgehog, and yet not at all. I figured 'why not?', but neither of us knew what we were in for.

The girl at the center of the film, Paloma, is sensitive, wildly creative, secretive, and in matter-of-fact despair over the uselessness of life. She has planned to die on her 12th birthday, and draws a gigantic calendar on her wall to mark off her remaining days, as she hordes pills from her mother's anti-anxiety meds and films everything with her father's old Hi-8 camera. But the film isn't really about her at all - the true center of the story is Reneé Michel, the concierge of the tony 5-apartment building, who goes about her day so unobtrusively as to be almost invisible to all around her, save the requite colorful street character Jean-Pierre, and Paloma. At least until the introduction of the new tenant, Kakuro Ozu, who takes an interest in both Paloma and Mme Michel.

Okay, that sounded creepy. He takes a decidedly non-creepy interest in the two women.

At first I was thinking that Paloma was the anti-Eloise, but she's more akin to a modern Harriet the Spy. A french Harriet the Spy whose grounds start and end with her own building. Garance Le Guillermic is excellent in portraying a precocious girl in full awkward glory without making her too cute/unbearable for words. And Josiane Balasko, as Mme Michel, is just sublime.

It looks like The Hedgehog was a late substitution in the Egyptian's calendar, replacing the film Happy, Happy. This may explain the small audience that was there last night. It is playing through Thursday, Oct 6. GO!

The Hedgehog official site
Landmark Theatres page on The Hedgehog