…Reamde
With the arrival of e-books and online retailers, I fret that local book shops might be doomed to extinction, along with the dodo, glaciers, and letting children trick-or-treat on Halloween without supervision. I love wandering amidst the towering bookshelves of a book store or library, but I admit that I often turn to the Internet for large book purchases, motivated by the significant discount. How can local stores compete with their online competition when they have to pay more employees and lease street-facing property? In 2006, a well-known Colorado book seller, the Tattered Cover, departed from its most famous location in the expensive Cherry Creek district (that branch was later relocated to a renovated theater in another neighborhood), a sign of the struggles retail book outlets face. Will the new options available to shoppers result in the death of the shop on the corner, just as Walmart extinguished the hopes of local business owners around the country?
But a few months ago, I attended a reading/signing by Neal Stephenson at the LoDo branch of the Tattered Cover, in which he read from his latest novel, fielded questions from a packed reading room (which seats over 250 people), and signed piles of books for fans willing to brave a chilly Colorado evening. Stephenson chose entertaining excerpts, showcasing his signature wit, and the crowd responded warmly to his reading. This only took 30 minutes or so, and the excerpts focused less on action than on introducing the major players in REAMDE, as diverse a cast as you would expect from any Stephenson novel: a draft-dodging, drug-running, video game CEO, a witty al-Qaeda operative, Chinese hackers, and Russian mobsters. Firearms featured prominently, hinting at danger to come later in the story. The Q-and-A session alternated between comedic anecdotes and insight into Stephenson’s writing process. Later in the evening, when asked if he thought of himself as an especially humorous person, Stephenson replied, “No,” earning hearty laughter from the crowd. The signing, while managed with efficiency, gave each fan a chance to exchange a few brief words with the author.
For an evening, I didn’t worry about the complicated future of book-buying. I didn’t feel guilty for my Amazon wishlists. This experience couldn’t be enjoyed from the convenience of my desktop PC. Instead, I listened raptly, laughed out loud, and happily handed money to a cashier in exchange for a heavy book that I could thumb through without a wait. Perhaps our local book stores still have a little fight left in them…