A Book Reading by a Favorite Author

An activity that my husband and I like to do from time to time is attend book readings, sometimes called "author events" on a bookstore's web site.

These can range in quality to really interesting to really dull. Sometimes, if an author we've seen once and enjoyed hearing comes out with a new book or a paperback edition, we'll go see him or her again.

Last night, I saw a particular author for the third (or was it the fourth?) time. My husband came with me; I believe it was the second time for him.

Were it not that I follow her blog, I might have missed it, because I don't regularly check the author events page at Third Place Books. Had that been the case, I would have been thoroughly bummed.

What I have always liked best about Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's presentations is that she gives a completely original talk. And it is always funny.

Last night, she departed somewhat from this format.

After her introduction, she took the customary photos of the audience with her current sock project in the foreground.

You can see what it looked like from her perspective here.

She then proceeded to talk about why she writes (it's a job where you don't necessarily have to wear a bra, particularly if you're a freelancer), the merits of wearing brown pants on airplanes (so they don't show the coffee stains that you habitually apply to them), and the advantages and disadvantages of being the only person writing humorous essays about knitters and knitting, getting many laughs from an audience that was admittedly predisposed to laughter.

This time around, however, she also read two essays from her book.

I'm not saying the selections she read weren't interesting and humorous, because they were. But it was not what I have come to expect, and I hate to say it, but I felt a little disappointed. It was so . . . conventional. And unnecessary, given Stephanie's dedicated following (as indicated by the SRO crowd and the fact that if you want to get a good seat, best to arrive as early as possible).

I had already bought the book, as undoubtedly many other attendees had. I expect that when I read it, it will amuse me. I don't need to have it read to me to sell me on it.

Reading and Riding (the Bus)

Until the last month or so, bus transportation was not a regular part of my life.

When I was in seventh grade, I was deemed old enough to start riding the bus by myself. As I recall, my mother gave me bus fare to get me the mile or so to our church in Berkeley, where I was enrolled in confirmation class. But then, we moved to Houston, to a suburb not well served by buses, and then to Ashland, Oregon, a small town where my transportation needs were largely met by walking or biking.

So I never really got in the habit of considering buses as a means of local transportation.

When I came to Seattle in 1988, I worked part-time over the summer at the Puget Sound Business Journal. For that, I did take a commuter bus from Lynnwood down to Pioneer Square. Since then, if I had occasion to go to downtown Seattle, I would often choose to take a bus, usually from the transit center near Northgate Mall.

From our house here in north Seattle, there are a couple of buses with stops within easy walking distance which run to downtown. One of these, the 5, changes to the 21 and continues south, dropping me off about a block from my office.

At about one hour, it maybe isn't the fastest way to get to work. If I drove to Northgate, took the 41, and then transferred to one of 3 or 4 buses heading south, it might shave off 10 or 15 minutes from the time I leave the house to the time I walk into the office.

But I have discovered that taking just one bus all the way gives me something I haven't had in a really long time: uninterrupted reading time where there is no other claim on my time — no chores that need doing, no other activities to attract my attention.

Last Monday, I decided I would try taking the 5 and see how I liked it. I was about halfway, maybe two-thirds, through a book called Dreaming in French. It had taken me 2 or 3 weeks to get that far, often reading just a few pages while eating breakfast or lunch.

I finished it while coming home Wednesday.

It was interesting to learn how a year studying abroad in Paris influenced the lives of the three women profiled — Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis — three women who are about as different as possible. I especially liked the chapters about Bouvier and Davis. Reading about  Jacqueline Bouvier, before and after she was a Kennedy, gave me a better sense of her as a complete person, not just the president's wife in a pink suit and a pillbox hat.

And Davis. I knew the name, and was vaguely aware that she had been in the news in the late ’60s. But I came away with new knowledge about the source of her activism and the details of her trial.

Also interesting about the book as a whole was how these three women were connected, through the threads of other people's lives who might encounter one or another of the three years apart.

Recommended Reading

A few days ago, I finished reading “In the Garden of Beasts.”

A while back, my husband Tim and I went to hear the author, Erik Larson, give a talk and read from the book at Third Place Books. We both found it very interesting. Consequently, I put in a book request at the library, and picked it up about two or three weeks ago.

As the author intended, it provides an unusual perspective on that period of 20th-century history. Obviously, now we know the evil that was Hitler and the Nazis. But in his book, Larson succeeds in imparting a sense of how the people and politicians of other nations viewed the situation at that time. A few people saw where things were heading, but many others thought that the political situation in Germany while Hitler was still only the chancellor, before President Hindenburg died, was too unstable to last. Also, the prevalent attitude was that what occurred in Germany was an internal matter to be dealt with by the Germans without outside interference.

The title of the book has both literal and metaphorical meanings. The U.S. embassy and the ambassador's home were both in the vicinity of the Tiergarten, a park in Berlin, which translates to "Animal Garden" in English. But tellingly, the political environment that the U.S. ambassador and his family, around whom the narrative revolves, found themselves could also be described as a garden of beasts.