#ShortcoversFail

Last week I was excited to try Shortcovers — I’ve been reading manuscripts and classics on my Sony eReader for over a year, and now wanted to try to buy new content from a source that made it easy to transfer from device to device. Shortcovers promises this is easy. And let’s keep in mind that I am not one to be afraid of technology. But many, many things went wrong:

1. On my way home from The Giller Light, I thought — “cool, I’ll download the winner (The Bishop’s Man) to my blackberry and start reading it tonight.” No such luck, I searched and searched, and couldn’t find the book. #shortcoversfail.

2. The next day I thought, “it’s got to be there now,” as I searched for The Bishop’s Man again. There it was, kudos to Shortcovers for having it up quickly. When I clicked, I got a message that I needed to buy this book. “Sure,” I thought, and clicked to buy. I entered my credit card information. “This is not a valid credit card.” I did it again. And again. And again. And again. It. Would. Not. Work. #shortcoversfail.

3. Then, Friday as I was tidying up my office, I dusted off my Sony eReader (I haven’t been reading a pile of books electronically in the last little while), plugged it in and thought, “okay, I’ll buy the books from Shortcovers, dump them on my eReader, and then transfer them to my blackberry.” Logon to Shortcovers, buy The Bishop’s Man and Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, and download them to my Adobe Digital Editions. Adobe Digital Editions says, “here they are!” And I can see the books. Next step, “plug in your reader and it’ll automatically recognize it.” Nope. I followed all the steps and for the life of me could not get my reader to pick up the Shortcovers content; this might not be their fault — apparently I might need to update my Sony interface but because I’m at work, I don’t have adminstrative capabilities for my laptop, I couldn’t do that. #shortcoversfail.

4. Back to my blackberry. Apparently, once you’ve bought the books they should automatically download onto your phone because they’re paid for. No. They don’t. Oh, I can get the sample chapters but I’ve paid for the whole book — not just the sample chapters. Nothing happened automatically nor was there a single useful “help” section that could be of assistance. Also, there’s no phone number, just those annoying email customer service forms. #shortcoversfail.

5. Now, I’ve got two great books, both I’m dying to read digitally marooned on my laptop at work with no way of getting them anywhere else and feel like I’ve wasted $25.00. I HATE wasting $25.00. And what’s worse — I want the content, I want to be able to read it in both places, I want it to work. #shortcoversfail.

Anyone have any suggestions?

#63 – Nocturnes

Even before finishing the first story in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, I had a sinking feeling that I shouldn’t have started another book of short stories so soon after finishing Too Much Happiness. Overall, Nocturnes reads and feels like a bridge — not a structure that connects two pieces of land, but that instrumental section in a song that marks a transition. The entire book feels like something Ishiguro has written in between major works. I missed the exacting, perfectly balanced narrative from Never Let Me Go, and had a hard time believing the characters in many of these stories. In places, the dialogue seemed forced, pitched in because it needed to be there and not because organic and/or interesting things were happening within the scene. And two of the middle stories were so, I don’t know, cliched and almost forced, that I almost didn’t finish the book. The last story, as I detail below, was a saving grace.

Sometimes, stories about music and the people who play and/or create it, never capture the true essence of the experience. You always feel as though it’s not real — the bands are made up, the musicians are made up, even when the author uses actual music to ground the story in some form of reality. In a sense, a lot of these stories read like those “ripped from the headlines” episodes of Law and Order where they take a real scene, Puff Daddy and J-Lo involved in a shoot out at a club, use no-name actors and tack on a murder to take the whole drama up a notch. Overall, this collection felt a bit like that, not utterly authentic, and I was disappointed because I firmly believe Ishiguro to be one of the world’s best living writers.

The first story, “Crooner,” follows a young guitar player who has emigrated from an Eastern block country to Italy where he’s making a living. He meets a very famous singer, a kind of “great one” who came up in the days when crooning lead to fortunes being made in Vegas at a time when the original Ocean’s Eleven was released into theatres. The aging crooner hires the young guitarist to accompany him as he serenades his wife. The performance, for many reasons is bittersweet, but the contract between the young and the old, their very different lives, what the crooner meant to the young man (who grew up with his mother listening to all of his albums), is poignant. Things are never as they seem, lives are never what they appear, and music doesn’t always have the meaning it suggests.

The other three, and especially “Come Rain or Come Shine,” are somewhat forgettable. There’s a ridiculous element to that particular story (“Come Rain or Come Shine”) that I didn’t find believable, and despite liking the main character, a fellow who teaches English in Spain (who’s kind of trapped in this transitory life), not a single secondary moved beyond a level of caricature. The tenuous connection to music wasn’t enough to keep me interested in the mess the this fellow finds himself in as he visits two, married, university friends. Yet, even when I don’t find the situation or the characters particularly engaging, I can still respect Ishiguro’s talent — a bad Ishiguro story is still better than most. There just didn’t seem to be enough emotional consequence in any of the stories to keep me interested throughout the read.

The other story worth mentioning, the very last piece in the book, “Cellists,” that was, by far, my favourite of the five. A young cellist starting me make his way in the world finds himself a teacher in an American tourist. They develop a deep and lasting teacher/student relationship over the course of a summer. She’s running away from a relationship she can’t quite decide if she wants to be in or not, and he’s trying desperately to live up to both his talent and his potential. They each take something different from one another: she believes she’s a genius, like him, and he believes his work is getting better simply through the power of her words, her explanations of what’s wrong with his playing.

The narrator of this story, a bandmate and friend of the cellist, tells the story with a detached sense of wonder, in a way — he sees the cellist years later, better dressed, nicely groomed, and is reminded of the strange summer they spent together. The last paragraph of the story might just be the best of the entire book — it’s pitch perfect in its assessment of both what happened to the cellist and how potential, or any kind of gift really, can easily slip away. It was utterly, heartbreakingly, authentic.

READING CHALLENGES: Ishiguro was born in Japan (even though he’s lived in the UK since he was 5 or something), so I’m counting it as Around the World in 52 Books, which might just bring me to, oh, five books read for that challenge this year. Pathetic!

#62 – Too Much Happiness

Alice Munro has the ability to describe in one sentence what would take lesser writers paragraph upon paragraph to explore. She can disintegrate a years-long relationship in a sentence and it never feels jarring to the reader. She explores the essence of human experience in a way that highlights the aching, pressure-cooker way that people relate to one another. Nothing seems easy in Munro’s world, yet it doesn’t seem overtly melodramatic or necessarily posed to be dramatic. It’s her innate skill to highlight the utter randomness of life and it’s inherent losses. Secrets that are taken to people’s graves. Lovers that ruin marriages. Short story writers that present a different view of a shared time period. It all sounds so cliche — like the worst of Hollywood’s blockbusters (yawn 2012). Yet at the deft hand of Munro these experiences are concise, cutting and often heartbreaking.

Of the 10 stories in the collection, I’d be hard pressed to pick a favourite. The novel-like depth of the title story, “Too Much Happiness,” its ironic title, its compelling heroine (novelist-slash-mathematician Sophia Kovalevsky), was the weightiest in terms of page count, and somewhat unlike the other stories in the collection with its historical, non-Canadian setting. The day-to-day structure of Kovalevsky’s life was in clear contrast to her academic life. In a way, the more successful she was at her work (regardless of how that success plays out in terms of stature), the less her personal life seemed in order. Regardless, Munro’s story charges forward, driving home until its sad conclusions (I hope that’s not a spoiler).

The underlying irony behind the entire collection, the idea that happiness, in its most cliched, Hollywood form, doesn’t exist. The people in Munro’s stories are content. They move forward in their lives because there’s nothing else but to do — and yet the existence of happiness haunts them all, from the young woman who has suffered an unspeakable tragedy, to the music teacher-slash-hippie-slash-performer. Each of the stories pulls you into a certain precise moment of human bliss, whether it’s the birth of a child, a problem solved, or comfort in a marriage. And then, without being content to have her characters simply enjoy these moments, Munro pulls them out of their reverie, even if it’s an everyday kind of thing, and puts them through the tough times. The opposite of happiness. Where survival means life has changed and change, coping or not coping with it, remains an integral part in what makes us human.

There’s a scene in “Dimensions” that will haunt me forever — it’s a visceral, unthinking reaction that her character has to the horrible events going on around her. And there’s moment in “Wenlock Edge” where the narrator describes another woman’s hair (blonde) as a colour that always meant cheap to her (I’m paraphrasing terribly here; my copy of the book has been leant to a friend). Both of these small, tight sentences that appear not in the end, but in the middle of these two stories, are indicative of the power of Munro’s work. I’ve been thinking about them for days. And once I get my book back I’ll add the proper quotes (how’s that for a lame review).

Masterful yet never manipulative, Munro gives you happiness, and its consequences, in its many forms in this collection. Take your own human heart with you as you read, realizing that it might be broken a little bit long the way.

READING CHALLENGES: Too Much Happiness is book four for this year’s Canadian Book Challenge.

Monday: A Reading List

Our email is down at work for the moment and that means it’s oddly quiet in terms of the interwebs. So, I’m stealing, “It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?” from Jonita who participates in the original meme? idea? post? from J. Kaye’s blog.

Books I Completed This Week Are: Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro and The Human Stain by Philip Roth.

Books I’m Currently Reading: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (ereader), Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro, Bitten by Kelley Armstrong (for The Undeath Match), The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s a toss-up which ones I’ll actually finish this week.

What’s Up Next?: Goodness, gracious me, I have no idea. Let’s see what I finish above first of all.

What are you all reading?

#61 – The Human Stain

I’m not keeping any secrets here when I admit that I had a really, really hard time reading American Pastoral. In fact, I would say I was very anti-Philip Roth after finishing that novel. Never wanted to read another of his books again. Openly gave my copy of The Human Stain the stink-eye for littering my TBR shelf. Yet, I’m also addicted to lists (for reasons I’m still trying to work out, seriously, in therapy), and decided to give it a shot — after all, I didn’t hate the film, and I really liked the beginning of the book when it landed on my desk about four years ago.

Fast forward a few years. As I’m trying to clear off my shelves before bringing any more new books into the fold, I took The Human Stain OFF the giant TBR shelf and moving it to the bedside table. And am I ever glad that I did (how many of my book reviews start out this way? With my preconceived and often wrong perspectives of the various books on my shelves?).

In short, I loved this book.

Honestly.

I did.

The Human Stain tells the story of Coleman “Silky” Silk, a semi-retired Classics professor is forced into full retirement over the disgrace after using the word “spooks” (meant as ghosts; read as racist). The novel’s narrator, a writer who hides up in the hills of this small Massachusetts town, slowly reveals the deep, and shaded, history of this broken man. An odd friendship between the two develops as Coleman’s disgrace becomes at once both unbearably personal and utterly absurd at the same time. No one, least of all the woman who was married to him for years, and who subsequently died during the whole fiasco, knows the truth about the man — (and if you’ve seen the movie this isn’t a spoiler, if you haven’t then SPOILER) that he’s actually black and has been passing as a white, Jewish man for over 40 years.

At 71, Coleman has found a renewed interest in life post-incident in the relationship he’s been having with 34-year-old Faunia, a janitor at the university who lives at a dairy farm, milking the cows to pay for her rent. Damaged by a disastrous relationship with her ex-husband, who has severe PTSD after returning home from Vietnam, Faunia is also coping with the tragic losses of her two children who died in a fire.

No one escapes untouched in Roth’s world, characters are flawed, ashamed, damaged, destroyed, suffer physically, mentally, anguish over all kinds of things, and yet, in this novel it all works. At first, I thought he really didn’t like women, when I read that Faunia was molested, illiterate and beaten, I did roll my eyes a little — but then as you go deeper in the novel, she’s actually one of the stronger characters. Sure she makes up lies to get through the day, but who doesn’t. And sure she hasn’t had a very nice life, but she also doesn’t make excuses for herself. Regardless, their relationship seems almost redemptive in a way, for both of them. Which means, of course, SPOILER, that drastic, awful things must happen.

The narrative structure of the novel is simple — a writer tells the story of Coleman’s life, so close sometimes that we forget he’s even there — and that leaves way for Roth’s complex and rich sentences to pull you deeply into the lives of these characters. It’s an effective, literary novel, one that rewards the reader by the quality of the writing and not just simply by the essence of the story, if that makes sense. All in all, the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list didn’t let me down this time. But Roth’s still one-for-one: I’m still not convinced he’s entirely an author for me.

READING CHALLENGES: 1001 Books.

#60 – Long Past Stopping

When the US presented this book at conference a world and a half ago, I was totally taken with the cover. The idea that the son of Jack Canfield, the author of those (ridiculous?) Chicken Soup for the Soul books, became a heroin addict and lived to tell the tale was intriguing. I did two things I never do: 1) judged a book by its cover and 2) picked up the book solely based on the fact that its blurb intrigued me. And trust me when I say I’ve got some issues with a book blurb. So much so that I rarely read them and almost never pick up the book because of them.

Annnywaaay. Oran Canfield’s roughly my age but we’ve had two very different lives. First of all, he grew up with a fiercely intelligent mother (that’s not so different from me) who pretty much kept him outside of your typical societal norms. He was raised by libertarians, went to an anarchist boarding school, joined the circus for a while (and competed as a juggler), and was often left with individuals who had questionable parenting skills yet nonetheless took part in forming him as he grew older. Secondly, his father left the family when he was very young and before his brother, Kyle, was born. Lastly, there’s that whole heroin addict situation. Oh, and then there’s the whole his dad became a multi-millionaire thingy too.

His memoir, Long Past Stopping, not unlike Dry by Augusten Burroughs, presents addiction in a harrowing yet utterly matter-of-fact way which makes it impossible not to get pulled into his story. There’s irony in how addictive these kinds of memoirs are — how easy it is to just keep reading as the hero (or heroine) moves from fix to fix. Gets themselves deeper and deeper into the black hole when they’d much rather be with that great girl that’s finally showing them the time of day. Also, it might just be me, but it’s so much easier to read addiction stories than it is to watch them (like say Intervention). There’s a level of separateness once you know the author’s gone through it and come out the other side. Also, Canfield’s a survivor. He doesn’t set out to get hooked on heroin. In fact, his introduction to the drug seems innocent rather than ominous, and the practical nature of how he starts shooting (he’s simply wasting too much of the drug by smoking it) seems almost blase when you read it.

The tone of this book is consistently infused with his infectious, intelligent sense of humour. And while the writing might not be Nobel-prize worthy (I have to admit I felt the dialogue was particularly weak), it’s impossible not to be interested in this book from start to finish. I’m willing to forgive things that I don’t normally (like weak dialogue) when it comes to this book (because, let’s face it, I’m a snob) primarily because the story itself, his life, is just so damn fascinating. And I’m willing to bet anyone else who picks up this book will end up with a Totally Inappropriate Crush on its author too. Just try it and see if you can put it down after browsing a few chapters. The structure of the book is smart too — it vacillates between his childhood and his adulthood in a way that breaks up the more dramatic, traumatic moments, and it’s certainly a relief when he finally finds his way off the junk.

Never say I don’t use my power for good. Here’s a quirky and fun road trip guest blog post he wrote for us over on The Savvy Reader. And to get a sense of his sense of humour, watch this video.

Where Does The Time Go?

There’s a line in one of my (currently) favourite songs by The Raconteurs: “It’s been a wasted, worried year.” Kind of fitting, I think, for the last twelve or fourteen months. Usually it’s my birthday that sends me into a fit of introspection — but as I’m well passed my birthday and it was hell bent on almost-killing me this year, I’ve been spending the last few weeks thinking about what on earth I’m doing with my life. Ever since my mom died just over a year ago, it’s as if my life was physically holding me back — if that makes any sense. For every step I’d take forward, my own body would push me back, culminating in the “episode” from the summer with my appendix.

Like bits of shrapnel left behind, all of the stuff that’s happened over the last year has finally started to work its way out. At least I feel that way. I feel lighter, and not just because I’ve lost a bunch of weight, but also because the sheer force of all that came down to rest upon my shoulders wasn’t terrible. It was awful, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t wish this year on my worst enemy, but it’s taught me a lot, and if you can take those lessons and move them into a more positive space, then it’s not a complete mess, right?

Oh, how I wish that things turned out differently. I wish that a lot. But there are so many parts to my life that I don’t control, and now that the disease seems back in remission for what feels like the umpteenth time, maybe what I need to do now is appreciate how much feeling healthy contributes to a better outlook on life. Yesterday, I walked halfway home and met my RRHB along the way (he was driving). I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t grumpy. I wasn’t exhausted. The day hadn’t pulled the life out of me teeth first. And it’s easy to be mad at life. It’s easy to hate your job, your station, your advantages, your disadvantages, your face, your legs, your grey hair, but it’s another to stop for a moment, plugged into the iPod, enjoying the crisp air and the onset of my most-hated season, winter.

Anyway. I’m going to try to post more often. But holy crap, life is busy at the moment.

#59 – The Year of The Flood

Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood was a slow burn kind of book for me. It took me ages to read, I think I finished five other novels while I was reading this one, but that’s not a comment on how much I enjoyed this book. A companion piece to Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood is a wholly satisfying story about a world hit by a waterless flood, and those people within who survive. I may be wrong, but I’d classify the book as speculative fiction — it takes place just far enough in the future to make you second guess how we’re living our lives and treating the earth, but it’s familiar enough not to seem too out there (if that makes any sense).

The novel moves back and forth between life pre- and post-flood. For a time, the main characters, Toby and Ren, one older, one younger, despite the different ways they arrived, live together in the Gardeners commune, where traditional religion that we’d recognize as Western in its influence mixes with holistic approaches to health, the earth, and life. The Gardeners, lead by Adams and Eves, don’t put chemicals in their bodies, they eat food that they grow, and many of them survive the waterless flood because of these skills.

At first, Toby resists the world of the Gardeners. She’s survived this long by going underground, as dangerous as it is, and becoming a part of a community wasn’t something she thought she needed to do. But slowly, as her skills as a naturalist, a healer, a beekeeper both evolve and are discovered, it’s apparent she’s found a place where she can belong — whether or not she wants to become Eve Six.

Ren, however, doesn’t have it so easy. As a young girl, her mother drags her away from her father’s house — safely ensconced in the highly programmed, chemical world — as a result of an affair she has with one of the key Gardener men. She’s a flake, there’s no getting around it, and when the relationship goes sour, Ren’s dragged back into the sterile world of her father’s people, sent off to university at Martha Graham, and then out into the workforce, perhaps not in the job she would have once imagined for herself in high school. High school and the Gardeners define Ren (oh how this happens for so many people, ahem) and without these key people in her life, she’s a little lost, a little heartbroken (over Jimmy, you’d remember him from the previous book — Snowman). But both Toby and Ren are survivors and their stories, when woven together, are equally compelling.

There’s nothing to do but be in awe of Atwood’s imagination. But if I were to make one slight criticism — I wasn’t as inspired by the “poems” that started off each of the Gardener sections — they seemed a bit contrived to me, but then, when you look through a hymn book in church, the sentiment is much the same, so perhaps I should just take them at face value. It’s a sad book, a book that makes you appreciate the fact that you can still put a seed in the ground and have it grow into a plant that could feed you, the birds, and the butterflies. And one that perhaps sets a new standard for saint-like worship of unconventional heroes, especially those that survive.

READING CHALLENGES: The Year of the Flood is my third book in this year’s Canadian Book Challenge.

#58 – Labour Day

I’ve been waiting to review Labor Day until my interview with Joyce Maynard was posted over on our company blog, The Savvy Reader. Then, all of a sudden weeks go by and I haven’t managed to type a single word let alone post any book reviews. Thankfully, I’m only behind by about three reads so it’s not that bad.

The novel takes place in a small New Hampshire town during a moment when all of the main characters are on the cusp of major changes in their lives. As the hot, uncomfortable last weekend of summer begins, Henry, who’s thirteen, and his mother, Adele, head out to get school clothes. For most, it’s an everyday kind of errand, for Henry and Adele, it represents a rare moment when she actually leaves the house.

While they’re at the store, Henry comes upon a bleeding, baseball cap-wearing stranger who asks for a ride home. Turns out Frank’s an escaped prisoner who takes refuge (and hostages if we’re being entirely correct) at Adele’s. There’s an element of suspended disbelief here, it’s Maynard writing the novel, and not McEwan, and while Frank might have committed a crime to get in jail, it’s never apparent he actually belongs there. There’s an element of Shawshank to his backstory, which gets unraveled over the course of the time he spends purposefully sequestered with Henry and Adele at their house.

The tumultuous relationship between Henry and his parents (who are divorced; his father’s remarried with a stepson and a new daughter) is necessarily exacerbated by Frank’s illegal presence. But not in the ways that you would expect. They’re not in danger. And the fear comes from the impending change more so than anything else. Maynard told me that she wanted to write a novel that looked at how this thirteen-year-old dealt with the sex lives of his parents — while he’s on the cusp of his own. This journey, or realization might be a better word, starts Henry off on the dangerous path that forces the unlikely situation to its necessary conclusion.

There’s an urgency to Maynard’s novel that echoes its tight timeframe. The major action of the book all takes place over those few days and the constraints of time drive the story. In turn, this makes the novel utterly readable — the perfect title to sit down for a couple of hours in an afternoon to finish, a book utterly meant for a “book-a-day” challenge. In some ways, the book reminded me, in setting only, to John Irving and Elizabeth Stout; story-wise, there’s a little of Ann Patchett’s Run in this book. Overall, the achingly and lovely last passages of the novel brought tears to my eyes.

#56 – #57 Crush It & The Tipping Point

There’s nothing new that I can possibly blog about Malcolm Gladwell‘s The Tipping Point. It’s a book that’s back in the Amazon.ca top 100 today, I’m guessing because of all the Nook news, and it’s simply one of those titles that you imagine everyone to have already reviewed, if not read. So when I was browsing around the Vancouver Public Library sale last Thursday trying to ward off the persistent stomach butterflies (there because of the whole public speaking element to happen the next day; bleech), I was pleased to find a battered copy of The Tipping Point from the Kitsilano Branch for a whopping $0.55.

The central thesis of Gladwell’s book, that little “things” can lead to sweeping change, seemed particularly relevant reading for the days leading up to and passing by Book Camp. The iconic work looks at all of the social conditions that surround a product, event or action “tipping” into an epidemic. From smoking to book sales, the book comes to some pretty cool conclusions about the power of word of mouth. Words that we toss around all the time, like connectors and mavens, this theory of something “tipping” has become part of the everyday business lexicon. And it’s easy to see why.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It! isn’t as intellectual nor as everlasting as The Tipping Point, but it’s a really good example of putting Malcolm Gladwell’s theories into action. Vaynerchuk grew his business exponentially by investing in his own personal brand, used the “free” tools of the internet to grow it, and then tipped over into the uber-successful range by simply working hard and “crushing it.” It’s a veritable how-to manual for his kind of success and a good handbook for anyone somewhat curious about social media.

I like how both books focus on finding/offering solutions instead of lamenting the demise of the “old” ways of doing business. Vaynerchuk’s work isn’t necessarily innovative; it’s stuff people have been doing on the internet for as long as the web’s been around. But what he managed to achieve goes above and beyond how everyday people use the tools, which is impressive. Also, he’s driven to succeed in ways that, yes I’m going to say it, regular people may not be — he’s a born Salesman, a picture perfect Connector, and proof positive that word of mouth absolutely works to drive community, which in turn drives sales, which in turn allowed his endeavours to tip into an epidemic.

The stickiness of Gladwell’s book versus Vaynerchuk’s can’t really be compared. I dogeared piles of pages of the former and returned my copy to work the morning after I read the latter. One’s a book that would benefit from repeated reads and the other I’d recommend as a handbook to anyone looking to build their brand through social media. All the way through The Tipping Point, I tried to define myself in terms of the different personalities Gladwell presented. All the way through Crush It!, I wondered how much coffee Vaynerchuk must drink in a day to get himself out there to the extent that he does — two very different intellectual exercises on my part.

Regardless, there were lessons from both books that I’d apply to my everyday and my work life.

1. That you need to pull the best, most relevant ideas from everything you read, fiction to non, and everything in between, and apply this learning to your life. Maybe it’s just in the sense that you enjoyed something and want to pass it on, but that your passion, about anything, can be contagious. And that’s not a bad thing.

2. Pay close attention to what goes on around you. You might not think you have anything in common with how “cool” becomes relevant, but within that, you’ll discover what’s authentic and what’s rubbish — especially in areas of your own expertise.

3. Don’t be afraid of people. Or situations. Or of doing things that might make you uncomfortable (read: running a seminar in front a large group of people). Ahem. YES, I realize how ironic this is coming from shy, scaredy-cat me.

4. Read more nonfiction.

5. Getting people excited about reading isn’t just about selling books. For me, it’s about the survival of our culture, whether it’s pop or otherwise, it’s a record of who we are as a people at the time. It’s necessary. It’s important. It’s valuable and it’s a part of our survival. Art matters. Fighting about it won’t get us to our goals any quicker.