I’ve been on a memoir kick: Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and now Richard Blanco’s The Prince of Los Cocuyos. (If it seems like a random collection it’s because I found them all in the memoir section of Big Apple Books on Federal Highway.) As enjoyable as learning about other lives has been discovering different places: Iran, Israel, northern England, southern Miami.
Writers love bookstores. Really? All those tables without our books on them? All those magazines without our stories in them?
I'm off for a week (not to Russia, though I'll be watching the World Cup while I travel). Back here on the 25th.
Friday everybody else's comments were so insightful, and mine were so trite, that I was almost glad that it was the last book club meeting of the season.
Today The Joys of Travel comes out in paperback, making it easy to slip into carry-ons and even personal items.
One of the bookstores I'm going to be reading at next month sent a list of suggestions, most of which were obvious to me but perhaps not to some other authors. My favorite, because I rarely read at readings, was "reading for more than 6-8 minutes at a time is sure to put your audience to sleep."