Gaiman Reading

Last night I went over to Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena to see Neil Gaiman read from his new novel, Anansi Boys. The event took place in this really cool multi-layered back courtyard. There were several hundred people there. Gaiman read the section where Fat Charlie dreams about his brother the spider god disrupting a fancy L.A. pool party. There was something really magical about listening to that scene while actually being outdoors at night in L.A. Gaiman also noted that Anansi Boys has hit the New York Times Best Seller list at #1, and then said something that stuck in my mind all night: “And I didn’t have to change what I write to do it. I just kept writing the kind of thing I wanted to write, and eventually enough people found it.”

While there, I randomly ran into a few of the USC students who I’d gone with to Serenity. I mentioned to one of them, the guy who’d organized the Serenity expedition, that Vroman’s carried a copy of Empire of Dreams and Miracles, which includes two of my stories, and he wanted to see it, so we wandered over to the science fiction section. He ended up buying it, and as it’s a bit pricey, I offset the cost somewhat by giving him one of my copies of Game of Thrones. (That’s four I’ve given away now. Just one left.) We loitered among the shelves a while, discussing various books. I couldn’t believe how many books he’d read. Most undergrads these days seem to have never read anything that wasn’t assigned for high school English class (and I mean come on, Of Mice and Men is cool and all, but if that’s really one of your favorite books of all time, you need to read more), but I had the feeling that this guy might’ve even read more science fiction than I have, which is a scary prospect. He’d even read Redshift Rendezvous by John E. Stith, which despite being one of my favorite books is fairly obscure. I was like, “Who are you?” He said that his mom is a voracious science fiction reader and will sometimes come home from the bookstore angry because they don’t carry any science fiction she hasn’t already read, and that she recommends the good ones to him. He also said that an adult mentor had died and left him his entire science fiction collection, and as a tribute to the man he’d read them all. I was impressed.