I have arrived in Rhode Island, where it is cold and rainy. Naturally I feel right at home. It isn’t snowing, though, which is a definite improvement to Sweden.
My epic US tour kicks of today with a visit to Barrington Books, and it comes just in the nick of time. I am in desperate need of more books. I brought three, and I am half way through the last one. This is what I brought for the journey:
– Nora Ephron’s I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections
– Georgette Heyer’s The Grand Sophy – Andy Weir’s The Martian
It’s The Martian I’m currently reading. I am alone in the hotel in Providence, Rhode Island. He is alone on Mars. I grant you that his situation is slightly cooler than mine. I long to be smart, funny in the face of great challenges and able to repair spacey things with duct tape. I am not there yet, but at least I have started to talk to myself in manner of Mark Watney.
I have a feeling that the arrival of Lathea from Sourcebooks will also be in the nick of time – she’ll get here in a few hours, hopefully before her author has gone any further down the road to crazy.
Lathea, of course, thinks I’m busy preparing for tonights event, which I am, in a manner of speaking: I am working desperately against the clock to finish The Martian before 5 pm. Otherwise I think I will have to make Lathea hide it from me. As first impressions go, perhaps it is better not to meet her with desperate, shining eyes, whispering: “Please, hide it!” as I thrust the book toward her before I can change my mind.
So. Back to work.
Ps. Maybe I should start to grow potatoes in my hotel room?
And here it is, the schedule for my epic US bookshop tour! This will in all likelihood be the best trip of my life.
The only thing that worries me slightly is flying. Not only am I a little, tiny bit afraid of it, but when I visited bookshops in the UK I ended upp traveling (by train) with five or six bags from the bookshops I visited. It seems physically impossible for me to enter a bookshop without buying a book. And when I say “a book”, I mean of course three or four. Or possibly five. Seldom more than ten, at least. And that is fine, and natural, and reasonable when traveling by train. But surely I can’t go through the security check with five different bags of books? Or check them in – “Do you have any bags you need checked in?” – “Why, yes, I have these five plastic bags?”
I guess I’ll have to FedEx them home as I go along.
I hope I’ll see you at one of these lovely bookshops!
Lucy Dillon, of course, is this absolutely charming and clever and funny person who writes excellent feel good novels that somehow often involve dogs. I’ve loved her books for years, so naturally I was thrilled and a little terrified to get to speak with her in this podcast, Speaking of Stories, that brings together one Swedish author and one international author visiting Sweden.
I had of course thought about a lot of things that could go wrong, the main one being that we would have nothing to talk about. Having nothing to talk about would have been increadibly awkward seing as how we began with a two hour lunch, followed by a one and a half hour of recorded conversation (eventually cut to a more reasonable 35 minutes), followed by another conversation in a bookshop.
Fortunately, Lucy Dillon is almost as talkative as I am and quite a bit much more charming and experienced. I could probably have contiuned talking to her for hours, so it is perhaps good that there was a producer involved who kept us on track and made sure we eventually stopped.
You can listen to the podcast here (where you’ll also find other episodes)
I have just spent a glorious week visiting a friend in Oakland. Since the trip was decided quite hastily, I didn’t do any events, and besides, I am going to spend three even more glorious weeks on an epic US book tour (I’ll tell you about it tomorrow). Instead, I spent my days as God has intended us to do: having coffee and “writing” in cafés (everyone knows that when you’re abroad “working” in a café, it’s perfectly all right to just stare out of the window) and visiting every bookshop that came my way.
In fact, I ended up spending most of my days at the Bittersweet Café in Oakland. It’s best feature is that it’s just opposite Laurel Book Store, which is of course an irresistable view. Naturally I visited the bookshop several times.
It’s an amazing bookshop, and my friend told me that they used to have my book in their Recommended-bookshelf. When we met up in the evening, I told him about how much I loved the bookshop.
“What did they say when you introduced yourself?” asked my friend.
“Introduced myself?” said I.
“Yes, told them who you were.”
“But… I just bought books. I didn’t introduce myself! Of course not. I couldn’t. I had no reason to introduce myself. What would I have said? ‘Speaking about nothing, I written this book…’ – ‘You haven’t asked, of course, but I have written this book…’ – ‘It makes no difference to you, of course, but I am a writer!”
“Sometimes I forget how Swedish you are”, said my friend. And I hadn’t even told him that I also snuck around the bookshop looking for my book. Of course I did. Surely every author do?
“So did you talk to them at all?”
“Well, sure. I complimented their bookshop and talked about the weather.”
Sometimes it’s quite a struggle being Swedish.
But the good news is that it turned out that I will be visiting them on May 21 for an event during my epic tour, so I’ll get to visit them again. And I bought some great books there, of course.
San Franscisco Book Review has reviewed The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, calling it “a stellar novel that demands to be experienced and inhabited”: http://www.sanfranciscobookreview.com/2016/04/readers-broken-wheel-recommend/
