My Life and Thoughts

Cosmopolitan readers!  I am delighted to report that The Possessed hits bookstores in Australia today, or rather tomorrow, because it is already the future in Australia.  A big thanks to Text Publishing and all the koalas and kangaroos for their hard work!  (The Australian edition, like the third US print run, corrects some errata and includes some missing information from first two printings, viz. a reading list and a shout-out to all the heroic English translators, including Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky, who have done so much to bring Russian books to the people who read them.)  I’m also thrilled to be on board with the Melbourne Writers Festival this summer.  I have never been to Australia, but am told that Australian people call it Oz.

Speaking of Oz, I had a great time in Southern California last weekend.  More shout-outs are due to my dear former classmate Amelia Glaser of UCSD, as well as to the upstanding non-dentist Dennis Wills of D. G. Wills, for setting everything up in La Jolla.  Thanks also to David Scheinker, a strong Russian-speaking male graduate student, who not only carried a heavy box of books all around the UCSD campus, but also drove me to CVS for toothpaste while Amelia was stranded in London by the volcano.

After 36 idyllic hours in La Jolla, I headed to LA for the LA Times Book Festival, where I was on a panel about book reviews, together with Laura Miller of Salon, David Ulin of the LA Times, Lev Grossman of Time, and Albert Mobilio of Bookforum. Although the panel was inconveniently scheduled to coincide with Sarah Silverman’s talk on bedwetting, it was nonetheless an honor to discuss book reviewing with four incredibly smart people, each of whom was about 1000x more qualified than I am to discuss book reviewing.

I was also really happy to meet a number of Possessed readers and would-be readers in the LA metropolitan area, including one very kind woman who approached me in line at the ladies’ room, and informed me that she was something like number 36 on the wait list for one of the 25 copies of The Possessed currently held by the LA Public Library.  This conversation took place immediately after the book-reviewing panel when I really had to go to the bathroom, and frankly I was also a bit overwhelmed by the general book festival ambiance (which brought me to mind of the Crusades, what with the tents, the desert-like weather, the humans in animal suits, the Scientologists, and the people distributing free Korans), so I’m afraid my immediate reply was: “But the book is only $10 on Amazon!”

Although this was probably not the most gracious thing to say to a well-wisher in line at the bathroom,[1] it was, nonetheless, factually accurate—and I remembered it again, when perusing this very kind reader comment to a previous post:

I just finished reading The Possessed. I was the first one to check it out of the La Crosse Public Library… by the time I finished I didn’t want to put it down, or give it back to the library for that matter.

See, that’s the great thing about buying the book: if you like it, you don’t have to give it back to the library!  Alternatively, if you don’t want it cluttering up your home afterwards, there are lots of great ways to give used books to charity, including Better World Books, which provides free, carbon-neutral shipping, and donates all proceeds to fund literacy initiatives worldwide!  It’s a terrific cause!

But OK, tolerant readers, I will stop here, with a quick reminder that I will be reading at Moe’s in Berkeley this Wednesday at 7:30.  If you get there at 7, I believe you can hear a Moe’s employee playing the accordion, followed, or possibly preceded, by Sergei Skarupo’s rendition of the following lyric gem:

В имении Ясна Поляна
Жил Лев Николаич Толстой.
Не ел он ни рыбы, ни мяса,
Ходил постоянно босой.

Графиня же Софья Толстая
Напротив, любила поесть.
Совсем не ходила босая,
Спасая дворянскую честь.

Подайте ж, подайте ж копеечку
Из ваших натруженных рук!
Я Льва Николаича Толстого
Незаконнорожденный внук.

All unhappy families are unhappy after their own fashion!

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[1] I think the bar was set in 1994, by Tarkan: see here (search for “gotta pee, man”).

Tags: book reviews, civic duty, libraries, literary criticism, money, Russian literature, THE POSSESSED, Tolstoy, translation

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