too many Daves

Macy Halford of The New Yorker’s “Book Bench” blog just linked to my recent post about Jonathan Lethem’s fantastic appearance here in Seattle. Luckily, she did more than link. She wrote about her own vast and mixed experiences at book events. Here’s an excerpt:

“If you’ve been to as many readings and discussions as I have, you know that they can be uncommonly boring affairs, or, worse, disillusioning. But a good reading or talk can be a profound experience. … (When) something ‘spontaneous and authentic,’ as Quigg puts it, happens at an event, literature comes to life; you, as a reader, feel instantly connected, intellectually and emotionally, to a like-minded community. It makes me think that living in an oral-storytelling culture must have been quite thrilling.”