EDWARD GAUVIN

Saturday 1/31 at 4pm at Cake Shop, 152 Ludlow St, NYC btwn. Stanton & Rivington. I’ll be reading with Jon McMillan (he has a story out now in the New England Review!) and Micaela Morrissette (a senior editor at Conjunctions who won a Pushcart and a best american fantasy award this past year). Scott Geiger was instrumental in setting me up for this reading up with his New School buddies Jim and Jason, who run the Enclave reading series; huge thanks to all three. Apparently, Micaela Morrissette named her hedgehog after Scott’s first published story, “The Pursuit of Artemisia Guile” in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 16 (July 2005). If you watch this site, further info and reader bios should eventually get posted there.

Come one and all!

Charlito, of Indie Spinner Rack fame, and co-publisher of what is to date my only published comics work, has produced a handsome handmade card game from the natural effervescence of his irrepressible creative spirit and sheer infectious joy at our soon-to-be President. I am egregiously late about notifying the masses of it, but when I saw notice posted on my friend GB Tran’s blog, I thought Duh, why not be a copycat. I’m still in time for inauguration. Please go buy it. Feed Charlito.

www.obamacardgame.com

Lou Marchetti, 1959

A guest postcard mysteriously signed “Sport.”

This is probably the fifth year I’ve kept track of all the books I’ve read, though only the first I’ve made it public. It seems this year I averaged about one book every two weeks—half my goal—and some of these are short books. Kinda sad, really. Of course, this doesn’t count books I re-read, books I read ¾ of and abandoned, or essay and story collections I dipped into once, twice, or repeatedly, but failed to finish cover to cover. Nothing’s here unless I read, for better or for worse, every word. That means excluding many fine books I wanted to pore over more closely, and at greater length, prolonging the pleasure so to speak, and collections where, for one reason or another, I left a few stories unread. Similarly, however, if I began reading a story collection the previous year, but didn’t finish it until this year, it appears here. Sort of cheating, I know.

I should make a separate list for stories, but that would involve more bookhandling than I care to deal with for a blog entry, since I kept no running record. Still, when I look back on this list and try to pick out what’ll stay with me… it’s been a year more for stories than novels. This list also excludes all reading done for work, not pleasure, and most graphic novels. In the early part of the year I went through these so quickly that I didn’t keep track.

Titles are listed more or less in chronological order of completion, rather than when I started them, though I omit all dates, which might otherwise go a long way toward explaining sudden long lapses in reading… nothing for February or June, and a big slowdown through summer. I enjoyed myself, and deliberately refrained from any rating system. The most embarrassing titles are those I just read to go to sleep… I’ll let you guess which ones. Enjoy!

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With apologies to Andi Watson, Benjamin Parzybok, and Small Beer Press.

At Slate, William Saletan says: “In the transition from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, we’re going to see a big shift in the politics of biotechnology. The conservative preoccupation with technological frontiers will be replaced, for the time being, by a progressive preoccupation with distributive justice.” People who know me will be sick of hearing this, but as William Gibson says, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”