Performed Indignation in The Book Site That Must Not Be Named

I should have trusted my instincts and skipped the commentary on Tea Obreht’s recent Orange Prize win in Book Site That Must Not Be Named. (Here's a link to a tweet to the piece. I can't bring myself to add to their pagerank by linking directly). I knew better than to expect cogent, insightful thinking about one of the more interesting literary prizes around. And still I clicked through.

What I found in Ruth Fowler’s indignant, mud-slinging screed unfortunately is not the exception in Book Site That Must Not Be Named, but the rule. I wish those of us who care about the level of literary discourse online could just ignore BSTMNBN, but their influence is such that we cannot in good conscience allow for this to pass as acceptable criticism.

So, as uncomfortable as it may be, let’s have a look at what’s wrong with this kind of writing. In order to keep this short, I’ll stick to the first 8,000 problems.

1.       Fowler’s goal is to take down The Tiger’s Wife, admonish The Orange Prize, and decry the importance of MFA programs in American letters. The problem here is that goals two and three require a cogent explanation of goal one. However, Fowler didn’t read The Tiger’s Wife, or at least not the preponderance of it:

I'm going to admit now that I haven't read all of The Tiger's Wife. A degree in English Literature has taught me many useful and discerning skills, amongst which is this little gem: if you can't get past page 50, give up.

Let’s just briefly note that a “skill” cannot be “discerning” and that she confuses the present perfect tense “has taught” with the simple past “taught”: this from the same post in which she suggests Obreht needs "heavy editing." Anyway, her transparency in “admitting now” that she didn’t read the novel is supposed to excuse her critical laziness. In addition, her literary education encouraged her “to give up” on texts that do not please within the first hour or so. It is difficult for me to take seriously a writer who so quickly throws in the towel when her tastes are not immediately satisfied.

2.       This is not to say that The Tiger’s Wife is beyond reproach: any work of art can be criticized, and reasonable people can disagree. What we do ask is that some care is taken to understand a work. This piece has very little to do with the merits of the work and quite a bit to do with ax-grinding. The target here is the MFA and the writers it produces:

I have read Tea's competent, assured, boring-as-fuck prose before: in a million other aspiring writers churned out by the MFA system, who then go on to take up professions as teachers in the MFA system, passing on their identical mediocrity to a new generation of award-winning identical mediocre visionaries.

And later:

...we should make 10 years in the real world compulsory for all writers who have graduated from an MFA course before the age of 25. That's 10 years without access to a trust-fund or Ivy League university or The Guardian (I say The Guardian merely because it annoys me, not for any scientific purpose).

          At the end of 10 years, they can submit their work in the proper channels

 In case you were still wondering if this was somehow personal, the use of Obreht’s first name gives the game away. This is the world we live in, and in itself is not incriminating. What is incriminating is the hypocrisy. Fowler argues that the central problem of the MFA is its role as artistic monastery: isolated, solipsistic, and self-satisfied. The answer is “the real world” and living long enough in the real world to have something to say. What Fowler doesn’t mention is published a memoir at the ripe age of…29.

3.       If there is a connecting thread to the bad intellectual behavior at BSTMNBN, it is a performed righteous indignation that the people who are lauded in contemporary literature don’t deserve it. The barely concealed rage that someone else is lifted up (and that “I” haven’t been) makes for sad spectacle. Fowler (whose profanity laced “commentary” could scarcely be fouler) doesn’t engage with what Obreht writes, other than a vague litany of adjectives, but demonizes who she is and what she represents:

 If [your writing} is not derivative of Anna Karenina, nor does it feature more than three bad metaphors or similes in the first 50 pages, and upon publication, the media doesn't mention your age nor the three letters M.F.A. -- then you're allowed to exist with the rest of the writing world, submitting your work like anyone else.

In the end, it’s the appearance of privilege that aggravates her. And it's entirely possible that there is some seed of a reality here. The problem is that Fowler skips the hard work of showing the symptoms of that problem. Instead, she takes the easy way out and moves into attack entertainment. What is easier in literary discussion than to pile on aspiring writers? Once the guns are blazing, attack entertainment cannot convince and cannot engender thoughtful discussion. Fowler positions herself as the lone voice of truth in an otherwise warped critical establishment. The list of people who have to be wrong in order for her to be right is comprehensive: MFA admissions committees, thesis supervisors, agents, publishers, critics, and prize committees.

When you set fire to the house, you bring a lot of attention, but in the end, your contribution is a heap of smoldering ruin.

Four Father's Day Fiction Ideas That Won't Make Your Dad Think You Hate Him

If you buy your father a novel with a father as a major character, 9 times out of 10 you are going to freak him out. Distant, abusive, absent, disapproving or dead: your typical fictional dad is about as warm and supportive as a pair of boxer shorts stored in the freezer.

Still, if you want to give your pops some fiction for Father's Day, here are few ideas that won't make him wonder what exactly you are in therapy for:

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The first non-biological gift your parents give you is your name. In Gogal Gungali's case, this gift is a source of befuddlement and familial friction. The Namesake is the story of Gogol's coming to terms with his identity as the son of first generation Indian immigrants. As he comes to understand himself and the story of his naming, his father's abiding love becomes the defining element of his life.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
For all of The Road's bleakness and terror, it is at its core a story of Man and Boy. The father's anxiety. The boy's innocent. The father's protectiveness. The boy's curiosity. Even among a charred American wasteland, the central tensions of fatherhood remain. Warning: the final pages are liable to bring even the burliest paternal units to their knees.

Gilead and Home by Marilynne Robinson
Both books, companion novels telling different sides of related stories, struggle with what it means to be a father. In Gilead, the aging Reverend Ames is writing a long letter to his young son, whom he knows he won't live to see grow up. In the process of trying to relay some of his experience and wisdom, he thinks of his own father and grandfather and their stormy lives. Ames' reflection leads him to not only give his son advice, but also to tell him of his own frailty. As sad as Ames' fate might be, his generous spirit and unflinching honesty leave his son a singular patronage.

If Gilead gives an image of an ideal, if unrealized, father, Home wrestles with the reality of trying to understand a son who does not know how to be one. Robert Boughton, Ames' best friend and neighbor, is also nearing the end of his life, and his son has come back to see him one last time. Has he come back for forgiveness or for a reckoning? Can the elder Boughton make peace? Does he even want to? Home is fascinating study in what it means to be the son your father didn't want, even as he adores you.
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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

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Ends Today: Giveaway of NOM DE PLUME

Quick reminder: if you'd like a chance at a copy of Nom de Plume, send me an email with the subject line NOME DE PLUME to readingape AT gmail DOT com by 11:59pm (Eastern) tonight.

This week, I've pulled my daily Literary Fact of the Day from Nom de Plume to show how intimate and fascinating this book is:

George Sand explained that the reason she didn't like her husband was his unattractive nose.


While working as a ranch-hand in Texas, O. Henry would carry around a copy of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary while herding sheep.


Sylvia Plath wrote The Bell Jar on textured, pink memo pads.


Patricia Highsmith was obsessed with her (pet) snails & once smuggled them into France by hiding them under her breasts.

The Blind Assassin Close-Read, Volume II

I'm participating in The Atlantic's 1book140 read-a-long of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin this month. The following is the second of a series of posts close-reading sections of the novel. If you somehow found your way here through 1book140, welcome. It's nice to have you
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I so enjoyed writing about the first sentence of The Blind Assassin that I am going to take a shot at discussing another smallish piece of the novel, this time from Part III.

Let's set the stage: Iris is visiting her family's grave-site, some fifty years after her sister's death. She describes the monument:

The Chase family monument is hard to miss, it's taller than everything else. There are two angels, white marble, Victorian, sentimental but quite well done as these things go, on a large stone cube with scrolled corners. The first angel is standing, her head bowed to the side in an attitude of mourning, one hand placed tenderly on the shoulder of the second one. The second kneels, leaning against the other's thigh, gazing straight ahead, cradling a sheaf of lilies. Their bodies are decorous, the contours shrouded in the folds of softly draped, impenetrable material, but you can tell they're female. And rain is taking its toll of them: their once-keen eyes are blurred now, softened and porous, as if they have cataracts. But perhaps that's my own vision going.

Alright, there's more backstory about the monument in the next paragraph, but let's stop here for a moment. Last time, I wrote about why first sentences are a particularly good place to stop and smell the roses a little as you read. This passage is an example of another way-station, which is ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is the narrative description of a work of visual art. (The greatest example in Western literature is Homer's description of Achilles' Shield in Book XVII of The Iliad, the most well-known one is in Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," where he describes, well, the urn.)

Why is looking at ekphrasis interesting? Couple of reasons. First, it is hyper-mimetic: not only does the writer have to describe the work of art, they also create the work of art. These are moments when a language artist is dipping into other art forms. Another reason is what ekphrasis does to the narrative time of the novel; it slows it down dramatically, even stops it. The closest cross-medium comparison is to a still-life, where precision, vision, and execution are at a premium. The writer is saying "hey, stop and pay attention to this, even though it has nothing to do with plot." For the close-reader, this is more inviting than cold pizza after a 2-for-1 night at the pub.

So, what's going on with this description of the Chase family monument?

1.  We have to remember that this is Iris narrating, not Atwood herself, so really this ekphrasis is Iris' vision, even as Atwood is staging it. Atwood is showing us what Iris is seeing, not what she would see herself or what we might notice ourselves. So, perhaps it's best to think of Atwood telling us something about how Iris sees as much as it is Iris telling us something directly.

2. Physical description tends to work structurally, so paying attention to how the description is built is important. Here we begin with the size ("taller than anything else") and then quality ("well done as these things go"). If the monument is a symbol of the Chase family, then the reading here is pretty simple: their family's story is bigger and more interesting than the average family's story. Or at least that's the way Iris sees it. One of these descriptions is empirical, "taller" is not up for debate. But the qualitative description certainly is. As cool as Iris' narration has been, here we get a small glimpse of how she understands her family history.

2. The most prominent feature is the pair of angels, and their parallel to Iris and Laura seems obvious. What is not obvious, however, is what exactly beyond two women the angels are saying about Iris and Laura. My sense is that the standing angel is Iris; it is in the "attitude of mourning" and standing, which suggests she is grieving. The phrase "attitude of mourning" is telling; is the angel mourning or just performing an attitude of mourning? At this point in the novel, Iris' attitude toward Laura and her death is still somewhat of a mystery. This angel is both turning away and touching the second angel, which suggest an ambivalence. Does she want to turn away but cannot fully? Or does she want to remain in contact but is forced to move away? At the very least, it is an enigmatic move and Iris is nothing if not a mystery here.

The second angel would then be Laura, the kneeling and sheaf of lilies (which often represent innocence) combined with the stare into the distance suggests youth and remove. She is the one being left kneeling, who is now looking away from the living.

3. The appearance of the angels is telling as well: "Their bodies are decorous, the contours shrouded in the folds of softly draped, impenetrable material, but you can tell they're female." There is an incongruity in describing "bodies" as "decorous," as "decorous" implies restraint and civility. How exactly can a body be "civil"? A similar incongruity occurs in the description of the clothing, which is both "softly draped" and "impenetrable" (Churchill's image of the "iron curtain" comes to mind.) The overall effect here combines frailty with strength, the physical with the emotional, and the overt with the mysterious.

4. The last sentence here about time and vision seems the most crucial. Of all the sculpted details that would be subject to corrosion, Iris (note the ocular reference inherent in her name) sees the blurred eyes and connects their aging with her own. I think a connection to memory is present, for what is memory but our seeing of the past? That time makes our memory "softer" and more "porous" means that our lived experience changes even after we have lived it, and our relationship to what has happened to us is in flux. And even the monuments, both sculptural and textual, we build in commemoration can never fully preserve the commemorated.
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There are other meanings to be gleaned from this passage, I am sure. And the next paragraph adds a layer of personal history to Iris' description that is worth incorporating into an analysis of this paragraph, but this is probably enough from me now.

What else do you see in this paragraph? What did I get wrong or miss?
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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Amazon | Powell's Books | Shop Independent Bookstores

Why Criticism Matters

It happens every so often that a student will, in the midst of a particularly detailed discussion of some poem or story, make something like the following objection: “It just doesn’t seem likely that the author was thinking about all of these things when they wrote this.”

Something about reading deeply into a text, pulling and prodding and exploring, bothers this kind of student, and they think that by appealing to the improbability that the author was thinking about diction or metaphor so minutely, they can short-circuit the analysis and guard against “over-analysis.” I’ve never quite been able to peg this student’s concern, why it is they are worried about seeing something that the author didn’t mean. Part of it might be that close-reading, if they allow it in, means they can’t read unthinkingly anymore. Part of it might be that they are afraid they can’t do this kind of work. Part of it might be that they see literary analysis as taking away some of the magic of literature. Whatever it is, they just want it to end.

This passively reading student, however, is asking a better question than they know. The interesting part of the question isn’t the “likelihood” but the “not thinking this” part. This student assumes that a writer knows exactly what it is that they are doing (they don’t) and that any readerly deviation from that intent is somehow contaminated and contaminating (it isn’t).

 What they don’t realize is that for the truly gifted, ability exceeds understanding. Whether some innate sense or learned sensibility or acquired skill, great writers can do things with language that escapes their own comprehension. Language itself is so rich that no one can claim to be the absolute master of the words they use and sentences they assemble. The task of criticism then is to re-attach the effect with the art, to fill the gap between what is written and what is conveyed.

The question the student should be asking is not “can we do this?” but “why should we do this?” The answer, which is rather unsatisfactory to an earnest 18-year old, is understanding and the mastery that understanding brings. To understand something is to no longer be subject to it, it is to intervene on your own behalf. In short, criticism allows us to be in conversation with art rather than subject to it and to our own unthinking reaction.

So to the student who protests that an author wasn’t thinking all of this stuff when they wrote it, I always respond: “You’re probably right. That’s why we need to.”

Recommended: Nom De Plume by Carmela Ciuraru (and Giveaway)

If you are a regular reader of The Reading Ape, then you're going to love Carmela Ciuraru's Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms.

Each of the sixteen chapters of Nom de Plume tells the story of how one author came to write under a different name, from how Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain to how Sylvia Plath became Victoria Lucas. Ciuraru constructs each story as part biography, part psychological profile. The tacit argument of Nom de Plume is that you can learn a lot about somebody by who they say they are, and why they say they are not.

Engaging without being breezy, informative without being pedantic, these essays offer insightful, fascinating literary portraits without the solemness and heft of so many literary biographies. By giving us a specific angle on the lives of these complex figures, Ciuraru gets to the essence of their lives efficiently and evocatively, which makes for pleasant and piquant summer literary non-fiction.
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I am pleased to be giving away a copy of Nom de Plume this week, courtesy of HarperCollins. Send an email to readingape AT gmail DOT com by Friday, June 10th, 11:59pm EST. Also this week: my daily Literary Fact of the Day on Twitter will come each day from Nom de Plume. So check that out too.
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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Amazon | Powell's Books | Shop Independent Bookstores

Book Blogger Convention Giveaway: We Have a Winner

http://pburt.wordpress.com/The random.org gods have spoken and the winner of the Book Blogger Convention Swag giveaway is PB from Reflections from the Hinterland. PB, I'll be emailing you shortly for your mailing address.

Thanks to all the entrants. Let's do this again next year.

Cheers,
TRA

The Close-Read: The First Sentence of The Blind Assassin

I'm participating in The Atlantic's 1book140 read-a-long of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin this month. The following is the first of what I hope will be a series of posts close-reading sections of the novel. If you somehow found your way here through 1book140, welcome. It's nice to have you.
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A good first sentence can teach you how to read a novel. It can tell you what the novel cares about and what you should watch for. The best first sentences are gem-like: a product of compression and value.

The problem with this though is that first sentences are just that: first. You don't know anything about the novel yet and race through the first paragraphs and pages just to get your bearings, to figure out who is who and what exactly the hell is going on. So most readers read the first sentence purely pragmatically as a step toward getting comfortable with the work.

This isn't wrong of course and some first sentences don't warrant much attention. But many of them do and the rewards of looking at them closely can enrich the subsequent experience of the novel. (A professor of mine once said that when we started reading a novel, we should read the first sentence and then shut the book for awhile, letting that sentence percolate and prepare us to read the rest. I have found this wonderfully generative. So let it be clear that at this point I have read only the first sentence of The Blind Assassin).

Alright, so let's take a look at the first line of The Blind Assassin:

Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off a bridge.

Some observations:

1. Without reading any farther, Atwood tells us a great deal about what we're in for. The subject of the sentence is "sister," so even if the predicate were not so juicy, this places the novel squarely in the domestic. The force of the main clause, though, might distract from the strangeness of the opening modifier. "Ten days" is an oddly specific amount of time after "the war ended." This specificity leads me to think that there is a connection between the war and its end and the sister's plunge, though no causal relation is indicated. Perhaps the disjunction between the scope of war and this intimate detail of family history creates the tension. The process of the novel will be to explain, and thus alleviate, that suspense.

2. And what war is this? Not too many clues here, though in late 20th Century English prose, you usually won't lose your money betting on World War II. Also, assuming for the moment that this took place in an industrialized country, it's been pretty hard to drive a car off a bridge for the last few decades, what with all the annoying safety regulations and all. So if that's a fair guess, then this happened in a time when cars were relatively accessible and before road safety became a concern. (That, or there was something wrong with the bridge.) Pretty thin evidence, to be sure, so we'll have to wait and see how this one pans out.

3. There's plenty to be said, though, about the sister. Well, not her exactly, but her car and the manner of demise. First, "drove" indicates an amount of agency that suggests this was not an accident. Had Atwood wanted to lead us toward foul-play or a mishap, I doubt she would have chosen "drove," and perhaps not even the active voice. The narrator's sister willingly went off a bridge. What we want to know now is why. More on this in a bit.

4. The other notable word choice here is the indefinite article "a": the sister drove "a" car off a bridge. We can guess that is was not her car; standard description would use the possessive to indicate ownership or affiliation. Whose car this is or how she came to be driving it is now also on the table.

5. As it turns out, the trajectory of the car with sister inside is not the most interesting thing about this sentence; this action is over at the moment of description. We want to know how this odd (not just the action itself, but the details as well) fate came to pass. This tells us something else about the novel; it is about the past. Not only is the sentence in the narrative past tense, but the narrator herself knows this history. So unless we flash forward to the present of the narrator's time, this is a novel about memory.

Here's what we have so far: war, memory, family, violence, and mystery. You could do worse to pull readers in.

6. This is extra-textual and so not strictly close-reading (forgive me Professor Atkins, wherever you are hounding earnest undergraduates), but this sentence reminds me of another first sentence: "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."

Recognize it? Yup, To Kill a Mockingbird.

7. Not only is the structure parallel, a temporal marker followed by violent act with vague origin, but the thematic concerns also overlap (really all but war). Comparing To Kill a Mockingbird's first line to The Blind Assassin's also strengthens the case for seeing "my sister drove" as meaningful. Here, Jem's injury is clearly not of his own doing. And like in The Blind Assassin, the temporal marker is unusual--that Scout says "nearly thirteen" rather than "twelve" turns out to be meaningful, as To Kill a Mockingbird is very much a coming-of-age/disillusionment story.

8. First sentences and paragraphs are also especially important in first person narratives because they tell us something signficant about the narrator's relationship to the story they are telling. How invested are they in it?How much time has passed? Is this language that they might actually saying? Or is it the kind of first person narration with no imaginable actual speech act? The colloquial "got his arm broke" in To Kill a Mockingbird suggest that this is speech. In The Blind Assassin, the narrator's relationship to the action seems cold, or at least somewhat removed from the trauma described. The specificity and impersonality of the time (we might expect something about ages rather than this historical time) are more clinical than emotional. Maybe clinical is too strong, but the narrator does seem to be at some remove.

9. This last point isn't about The Blind Assassin directly. I got thinking about the evolution of first sentences in literature. This one feels modern, as much about intrigue as it is about art, without being experimental or otherwise jarring. It has a story-teller quality to it (if you were going to write a one-sentence story, this would be a good effort). In contrast, the novel's greatest century, the 18th, saw authors start broadly and drill down from there ("It is a truth universally acknowledged," "It was the best of times," "All happy families are alike," and so on). The standard opening now works the other way, using a detail as a wedge to introduce the story. Contemporary authors (massive generalization warning) seem to put a premium on keeping the reader off-balance at the start, rather than hold their hand. I suspect part of this is fashion, but another part might be the novelist's unwillingness to make the bold statement or sweeping proclamation. (Thanks a lot, culture wars).
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Alright, I think that's all I have on this. On to the second sentence! Kidding, kidding. I'm sure I'll make it through the next paragraph at least...
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Buy books mentioned in this post (or anything else, actually) using the below links, and The Reading Ape gets a small referral fee to defray our nominal operating costs.

Amazon | Powell's Books | Shop Independent Bookstores

Thoughts on the 2011 Book Blogger Convention

Man, how things have changed in a year. At the 2010 Book Blogger Convention, bloggers were tapdancing for publishers to get review copies. Now, the bloggers seem to be in control. This is the big takeaway: the book industry is actively courting the book blogosphere.

Other notes on the day:

1. The term "book blogger" is now unwieldy.
Genre diversity is no longer the only thing differentiating book bloggers: style, professionalism, commerce, tone, experience, technological savvy, and a score of other chacterisitics make describing what a book blogger does extremely difficult.

2. As important as book blogs are becoming, book bloggers are still pretty provincial.
The cagey organizers left plenty of time for Q & A after the various panels; this was usually the most interesting, not the the most informative, part of the sessions. For example, given the chance to query folks in charge of marketing for the big six publishers, most asked weirdly specific questions about their own little problems. You have the ear of the people most directly effecting book publicity in America and you ask about e-galley expiration dates. Seriously? This is one example of a larger trend; most bloggers aren't thinking beyond their own Wordpress dashboard.

3. Authors are becoming a bit of a pain.
This might just be my own misanthropy, but having to fuss over authors directly is a drag. Not only are we told only to shield authors from negative reviews, but we also have to screen increasing numbers of author pitches. I understand; authors, especially those from smaller presses and self-publishers, are desperate for exposure. We wish you the best of luck, but most of us are swamped with reading and writing as it is.

4. ARC obsession
The dangled carrots of the book blog world, advanced review copies (who gets them, who gives them, and when) determine the professional ethics of book blogging. It seems that if you solicit a review copy, you enter into a de facto moral contract with the publicist, publisher, and author. Even if the code is as simple as "be polite" or "review the work, not the person," your continued ability to get review copies depends upon your compliance. More and more, I am becoming  fan of JGBTFB (just go buy the fucking book). This way you can write without any concern that you will violate the covenant of book publicity.

5. Social Media Fatigue
Goodreads. Librarything. Shelfari. Amazon reviews. Facebook. Twitter. Linked In. Online forums. Not to mention your own blog. Managing all of this stuff is a major headache. A future topic of discussion would be some best/most useful practice demonstration/analysis for those of who write about books independently. What works for whom and why? What are the advanced features and behaviors that will give our ideas the widest circulation?

6. Ascending to Pay
At this point, more than a handful of people who started as amateurs are now professionals. One of the undiscussed topics was how did you do it? Should I? How much do you make? And how? Now that book blogging is no longer principally the perview of rank amateurs (most are at least comptent amateurs), the ins and outs of making your blog pay is a conversation worth having--not just because there is money to be made, but also because people should think about the costs and benefits of going pro---or pro-ish.

7. The Writing is the Thing
I think most people who read book blogs can agree that the number one reason to keep reading a blog is the writing. Whether formal, conversational, satirical, confessional, analytical, emotional, comedic, or arch, what a blog says and how they say is its central feature. So it's a bit of an omission not to talk about writing approaches at all. Staging such a discussion is probably quite difficult, but I think we could all benefit from thinking about how to do the work of writing about books better, whatever we understand better to be.

8. Tools
I was excited to see a panel on technology this year, and I think more of this needs to happen. There are so many moving parts to the web that book bloggers could stand to learn more about (my hand is raised highest here). A series of 30 minute tutorials on web design, fonts, SEO, Google Analytics, hosting, and any of the myriad topics an independent web publisher should know about would be a major help.

9. It's the People, Stupid
I know this, but I always forget it: the sessions themselves aren't the main draw to these kind of events. It's the people you know and don't yet know that matter. I should have tried to make the reception the night before or any of the satellite events, but my natural introversion and stubborness took over. Someone remind me next year that I am an idiot if I don't do this stuff.
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And with that, The Reading Ape is going to step away from the big picture, meta-blogging posts and return to something like regularly programming. Thanks to my non-blogging readers for sticking out the last few weeks. You both have been very patient.

Updates on Book Blogging Survey and Book Blogger Con Swag Giveaway

Two follow-up things on this Memorial Day:

1. The responses to my eight questions about book blogging have been excellent. I encourage those of you interested in the present and future of book blogging to check them out. I think I will not respond myself and let my series of posts on book blogging speak for themselves.

2. The interest in my Book Blogger Convention Swag Giveaway has also been strong. The stuff is sitting right here next to me. I won't go through it (that spoils the fun), but there are 8-10 books and a variety of other trinkets. I'll keep entries open until tomorrow night at 11:59pm EST. If you still haven't entered and want to, just send an email to readingape AT gmail DOT com and include a link to your book blog (sorry book bloggers only please).

Reflections on the Book Blogger Convention coming up...maybe today, but probably tomorrow.