SUSAN SWARTZ 9-15-2011

Digital wise, author Andrew Lam has split loyalties. He goes
online for his news. But when he reads a book, the author of “East
Meets West: Writing in Two Hemispheres,” prefers his words on
paper.
A self-admitted sentimentalist, Lam goes for the full experience
– “the feel of the book’s weight and the smell of its pages.”
“There’s something sensual,” he says, “about reading a novel in
the old medium that cannot be had in the new.”
Mystery writer Linda Morganstein – “Harpies’ Feast” – is also a
print book reader but she’s trying to justify an iPad. “When I
start traveling more, I’m snagging one.”
With so much change happening in the publishing world, I
wondered how far down the digital highway authors have ventured in
their own reading habits and queried a few who will be at the
Sonoma County Book Festival Sept. 24 in Santa Rosa.
Author Don Lattin who wrote “The Harvard Psychedelic Club” is a
former newspaper guy who’s always favored “ink sprayed on trees”
but confessed to buying an iPad and now “going through some kind of
strange spiritual conversion.”
Then there’s Carolyn Cooke, an O’Henry Award winner whose new
book is “Daughters of the Revolution.” She reads books the old
fashioned way – “turn pages, write in the margins, and leave them
splayed and half-finished around the house.”
Plus, she knows the thrill of stumbling upon a literary treasure
that only happens in a book store, like “the hole in the wall book
store in Nevada” where she scored a John Updike first edition.
“I usually remember where I bought my books, details of the
place and the circumstances and where I was while reading them. The
books themselves are also repositories of personal history – with
marks, stains, driving directions.”
Her favorite book store is City Lights in San Francisco where
she goes “in the way one might visit a mystic – to find what I
didn’t know about yet.”
Lattin’s is Mo’s Books in Berkeley “where I can still smell the
cigar of Moe who passed the store onto his employees after going to
that great remainder table in the sky.”
As for the future of the book biz Lam acknowledged there’s been
“bad news, with shrinking publishing houses and out of business
bookstores.” But one thing, he says it’s easier for writers to get
published. “If one is determined and with the way books can be
printed, a manuscript that in the old days couldn’t find its way to
the public now has a better chance.”
How they get people to read them is another challenge. Today’s
authors have to be their own publicists, including using new media.
Lattin, whose book is about Timothy Leary and Ram Dass and the
early days of drug experiments, scored when he posted a video on
early LSD research on YouTube, “and it got 800,000 views and landed
me on CNN.”
However, the traditional style of author readings is something
Lam hopes won’t disappear. “The intimacy of real time cannot be
beat regardless of how good technology is. I’ve been interviewed on
Skype before and it’s always a hollow feeling after.”
Carolyn Cooke remains hooked on “meeting people who read, who
bring their full intelligence to what they read.” And Morganstein
said, “Seeing people in a real setting you see their body language,
their expressions, their laughing, dozing, frowning. On the other
hand you can do a virtual book tour in your pajamas.”
These writers and more plus poets and panels including one on
the future of the book business will be part of a day full of book
talk in Santa Rosa at Courthouse Square Saturday, Sept. 24. Check
out the schedule at socobookfest.org.
Susan Swartz is an author and journalist in Sebastopol. You can
also read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear her Another Voice
commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is
su***@ju***********.com
 
Susan Swartz is an author and local journalist. You can also
read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear her Another Voice
commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is
su***@ju***********.com.