What a great meetup we enjoyed last night. Food= fabulous. Wine= demolished. Friendships= growing. Although we have quite a large group now of people reading with us (about 40), the core group of peeps showing up to club is about 10, give or take. The rain actually brought more folks than usual, due to cancellations. But it felt intimate, and comfortable, and special. I don't think going in to creating a book club did I think we would get to broach topics such as what our dreams are, but we do, and it's great and it's light, fun, and a damn great way to spend your Tuesday evening every six weeks or so. Last night I had a handful of texts from some really great peeps that didn't get around to reading the book, and therefore felt strange showing up. I know this will be an ongoing perception, but please let me help you out with that right now: COME. If you didn't get around to the book, TRUST ME when I say you will still have a blast, and you'll get some good information about the next book. And there's no commitment so if you want to come once and don't like it, there's no pressure! Promise! But I think I can say a good time was had by all parties. Of course we never push anyone out the door, so we ended up talking and listening to records until about 11:30 when we all finally cashed in. It was a lovely time, and thank you to new and old friends alike. Can't wait for the next one- which will probably be early November, at Natasha's place. So plenty of time to get this new book, which I PROMISE YOU --> You do NOT want to miss out on.
It's the Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall. This is the perfect book for Autumn, for blankets and coffee and snuggling up on your couch, getting pulled in and not being able to put it down. There's a pretty fantastic review of the book at Amazon, which I'll re-publish below. I found it Borders for $14, but you may even check Half Price Books as well. I always say, support your local bookstore first, and if they don't have it, then hit up Borders/ B&N or Amazon. But it's every where. And every author is applauding this novel as well. I cannot wait to "sink my teeth" into it. I hope you will too. Here's the review straight from Amazon, to you:Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, March 2007: Not since Fight Club have a I read a book that sizzled with such fierce originality and searing vision as Steven Hall's electrifying debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts. It's a twisting, trippy thriller that tears through the landscape of language, revealing the lurking terrors uncovered in every letter of the written word. Steven Hall swims in the same surreal waters as pop-culture pioneers David Lynch and Michel Gondry, and The Raw Shark Texts deserves to be shelved somewhere between Trainspotting and Life of Pi. It pulls you under like a riptide, leaving you exhausted, exhilarated, and gasping for air.
But don't just take our word for it. We asked Audrey Niffenegger, one of the most creative contemporary writers working today, to share with readers her take on Steven Hall's debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts. Check out her exclusive Amazon guest review below. --Brad Thomas Parsons
Guest Reviewer: Audrey Niffenegger
Audrey Niffenegger is a professor in the Interdisciplinary Books Arts MFA Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. A visual artist, she shows her artwork at Printworks Gallery in Chicago. The Time Traveler's Wife, her first novel, was an international bestseller and was one of Amazon.com's Best Books of 2003. It won several awards and is being made into a major motion picture. Her visual novels, The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress, were recently published by Harry N. Abrams. Miss Niffenegger is currently hard at work on her second novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, a ghost story set in London's Highgate Cemetery.Eric Sanderson has lost his memory, his girl, his life as he once knew it. His pre-amnesiac self is sending him letters, a sort of correspondence course on how to be Eric Sanderson. Unfortunately, this previous self didn't really have it all together either. This is too bad, because the source of all the trouble is a conceptual shark, a Ludovician shark, no less. Soon Eric is on the run, trying to piece it all together and find true love before his mind gets wiped by the shark for the twelfth and probably final time.
Steven Hall is an inventive, funny and extremely smart writer. I am a letterpress printer and a typophile, and I was drawn to his book because of the typography: The Raw Shark Texts is riddled with typographic games, codes, a flip book, and a boatload of very elegant plot devices that hinge on collisions between the Information Age and the imagination. At one point Eric and Scout, his guide/love interest, are speeding away from the conceptual shark on a motorbike. Scout eludes the shark by exploding a letter bomb, a bomb made out of old metal type; the type diverts the shark into a stream of random letterforms. At this I practically fell off the couch with admiration.
There's plenty to groove on in The Raw Sharks Texts even if you're not a type maven. There's echoes of Cyberpunk, Borges, Auster; there is adventure on the high seas, lost love, an exploration of what it means to be human in the age of intelligent machines. The Raw Sharks Texts is huge fun, and I gleefully recommend it. --Audrey Niffenegger
From Publishers Weekly
Hall's debut, the darling of last year's London Book Fair, is a cerebral page-turner that pits corporeal man against metaphysical sharks that devour memory and essence, not flesh and blood. When Eric Sanderson wakes from a lengthy unconsciousness, he has no memory. A letter from "The First Eric Sanderson" directs him to psychologist Dr. Randle, who tells Eric he is afflicted with a "dissociative condition." Eric learns about his former life—specifically a glorious romance with girlfriend Clio Aames, who drowned three years earlier—and is soon on the run from the Ludovician, a "species of purely conceptual fish" that "feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self." Once he hooks up with Scout, a young woman on the run from her own metaphysical predator, the two trek through a subterranean labyrinth made of telephone directories (masses of words offer protection, as do Dictaphone recordings), decode encrypted communications and encounter a series of strange characters on the way to the big-bang showdown with the beast. Though Hall's prose is flabby and the plethora of text-based sight gags don't always work (a 50-page flipbook of a swimming shark, for instance), the end result is a fast-moving cyberpunk mashup of Jaws, Memento and sappy romance that's destined for the big screen.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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