Just a Teaser
Book Expo America: Day One
After a beautiful ride down from Brooklyn, made more interesting by the intermittent Armageddon rains and a speeding ticket, I arrived in DC for Book Expo. This is my third convention, and when I glimpsed the building-sized banners welcoming us and the charmingly crumpled bookpeddlers milling around pre-show, I was met with the same feeling of awe and dread that I have every year. The dread comes from having to attract the attention of the harried booksellers and brutally-efficient publishers long enough to eke out some words about free speech. (And money.) Awe, because I would like to believe that the entire English-language publishing world is gathered here this week, in essence, to celebrate writing. "To sell things," my travel partner interrupted an earlier version of this reverie to point out, but still, the things that they are selling are books, books that started as letters being pecked into some lonely Word document by some hopeful writer. Being confronted with the business end of the writing world makes me want to revisit my less-nuanced moanings about capitalism ... because as a propagator of nice sentences it seems not so evil. (Of course, it's also a pusher of bad sentences, which is cardinal-sin territory ... later in the week I'll review my top bad book finds on the convention floor).
Soon, I'll take you inside.
After a beautiful ride down from Brooklyn, made more interesting by the intermittent Armageddon rains and a speeding ticket, I arrived in DC for Book Expo. This is my third convention, and when I glimpsed the building-sized banners welcoming us and the charmingly crumpled bookpeddlers milling around pre-show, I was met with the same feeling of awe and dread that I have every year. The dread comes from having to attract the attention of the harried booksellers and brutally-efficient publishers long enough to eke out some words about free speech. (And money.) Awe, because I would like to believe that the entire English-language publishing world is gathered here this week, in essence, to celebrate writing. "To sell things," my travel partner interrupted an earlier version of this reverie to point out, but still, the things that they are selling are books, books that started as letters being pecked into some lonely Word document by some hopeful writer. Being confronted with the business end of the writing world makes me want to revisit my less-nuanced moanings about capitalism ... because as a propagator of nice sentences it seems not so evil. (Of course, it's also a pusher of bad sentences, which is cardinal-sin territory ... later in the week I'll review my top bad book finds on the convention floor).
Soon, I'll take you inside.
posted by wordwhore at 12:49 AM
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