Richard Ford may well have been the first author reading I attended as a Lemuria employee. I know that I started here mid-January 2002 and his reading for A Multitude of Sins was mid-February. So I am certain that I was green when it came to bookselling, author events, and frankly just about everything. I don’t remember much but I do remember that I got off work went home and then Wendy and I attended not as workers but more like customers. I remember coming into a jammed store where most people were already seated for the reading.
I don’t recall what was read but I do remember a specific answer that Ford gave to a customer question. I believe the question was what should a writer be reading – I could never pretend to imitate the eloquence with which Ford answered the question, but here’s how I took it: don’t read any bad books, but read as many good books as you can. Now I’m no writer – and have no desire to be one – but I am a bookseller and a reader so I took Ford’s answer and applied it to my own situation. If I want to be a good bookseller – a bookseller with credibility – a good reader – then I need to read a whole lot of really good books.
Fast forward ten years to the opening of Canada: First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. Wow, that’s a heck of a sentence. From that moment on the book is pregnant with the suspense of what robbery, what murders? (I swear it took me half of the book to realize that he did NOT say that his parents committed the murders.) It is a suspenseful book, but it’s also a quiet book – full of nuanced character development. The kind of book where the descriptions of the clothes the characters wear turn out to be crucial to their development within the novel – how tall they are, what kind of cigarettes the smoke, etc. Check this sentence out:
Any different way of looking at our life threatens to disparage the crucial, rational, commonplace part we lived, the part in which everything makes sense to those on the inside — and without which none of this is worth hearing about.
Point is – you should read this book.
Join us on Tuesday, June 12th for a signing and reading with Richard Ford at 5:00 and 5:30.
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