The one and only Ray Bradbury

Happy Halloween!

In just a couple of hours, Grand Master of Science Fiction (some nifty title, eh?) Ray Bradbury will be joining us for a special signing of his classic novel, The Halloween Tree. In honor of the event, I have, er, borrowed a brief questionnaire from today's Shelf Awareness that Mr. Bradbury kindly answered:

The author of dozens of books, hundreds of short stories, many screenplays, teleplays, stage scripts, poems and essays, Ray Bradbury is one of the most celebrated writers of our time. Among his best known works are Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury's most recent book, Now and Forever, was published weeks after his 87th birthday. He has been honored with a National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a National Medal of the Arts and a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation. He lives in Los Angeles.

On your nightstand now:
See next answer.

Favorite book when you were a child:
Actually, there were two: Tarzan of the Apes and Thuvia, Maid of Mars. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote both and they influenced me tremendously between the ages of nine and twelve. They both sit on my nightstand now.

Your top five authors:
Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

Book you've faked reading:
Why would I ever fake reading a book? Books are meant to be read.

Book you are an evangelist for:
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I've read it many times and seen many film adaptations of it. This book helped me as a writer, and I wrote The Halloween Tree, in a way, as my own Christmas Carol.

Book you've bought for the cover:
I don't buy books for their covers. A nice cover is fine, but it's what inside that counts.

Books that changed your life:
All the books of H. G. Wells, which helped me care about the future. Also because books like The Invisible Man are paranoid, and all 15-year-old boys are paranoid. That's when they discover what death means; they take a stand against death and Mr. Wells helped a 15-year-old boy do that.

Favorite line from a book:
"He was born with a gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad." This is the opening line of Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I consider it to be the greatest American novel of the last 75 years. My fun comes from buying a new copy of the book and walking across Paris, starting in the morning at the Eiffel Tower, reading and walking all day, stopping for a coffee or an aperitif, and finishing the book out in front of Notre Dame at sunset.

Busy, busy, busy

It has been a crazy, busy, exciting week here at Vroman's.

A week ago Saturday the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Author Feast and Trade Show was held at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A. , and a great many Vroman's employees attended. Attendance at this fun annual event was up so much, in fact, that SCIBA had to add some extra tables in the dining room to accommodate all the booksellers, authors, and publishers -- tables in a terrible location, where we couldn't see or hear most of what was going on up at the podium! (I know because I was seated at one of them.) No matter: the authors who dined with us were great sports, and we all joked about being at the "kiddie table" and threatened to start a food fight. During our soup course, mystery writer Don Winslow regaled us with stories about his career as a private investigator. I have a strong stomach, so Jeff Swimmer's (A Field Guide to Household Bugs) little chat while we ate our entrees didn't faze me in the least. I ignored my dessert in favor of listening to children's author Frank Beddor relate the tale of how he spit on a student during an author event at a school. It was a fine evening of author conversation that I probably enjoyed more than I would have at a table with a better view of the official goings-on.

Monday and Tuesday were spent setting up and then operating a booth at the ginormous Governor's Conference for Women in Long Beach. This was our second year participating, and we learned so much last year that set-up and clean-up this year ran like clockwork. Among the many authors speaking (and then signing books in our booth) were Elizabeth Gilbert, Nora Ephron, Thomas Friedman, and Linda Ellerbee. Attendance at this event was down 14% from last year, due to the devastating wildfires, but it was still a great conference.

Thursday evening was a wonderful homecoming for Linda Urban, who used to be Vroman's events coordinator. I had the pleasure of working with Linda for -- oh, about a decade, I'd guess, and we're good friends as well as colleagues, so her success as a writer is absolutely thrilling for me. A large crowd filled with friends, current and former Vroman's booksellers, customers, and admirers filled our events space, where Linda read three chapters from her delightful children's book, A Crooked Kind of Perfect. I hope she had a fraction as good a time as I did.

Finally, on Saturday afternoon, our beloved buyer, Sherri Gallentine, married her longtime beau, Rich Zanteson. The happy couple are leaving for their honeymoon in Spain today -- wish them well!

The Lovely Alice Sebold

Today I and a group of booksellers from around L.A. had lunch with Alice Sebold, best known for her novel The Lovely Bones. Her new book, The Almost Moon, was published last week, and the shy Ms. Sebold agreed to a small "industry only" get-together at Vroman's in our conference room.

If you've never met Alice Sebold, I hope you get the chance to someday. She is delightful, soft spoken and witty. I first met her about a year before The Lovely Bones was published, at a Southern California Independent Booksellers Association dinner; after spending the appetizer course talking with her, I knew I had to read her first novel, which was then still only in manuscript form. I've run into her a couple of times in the intervening years, and I was thrilled that she remembered me today after all this time.

The Almost Moon has received mixed reviews, and Alice said that in general, European critics seem to get it more than American ones do. "They all seem to ask, 'Well, who hasn't wanted to kill their mother?'" she laughed, referring to the central plot point of her novel. When a bookseller from Dutton's Brentwood asked her if she based the book on her own experience of having to care for an elderly parent, she slapped her hand on the table and replied cheerfully, "No. It's fiction, babe."

Her tour is fairly short, just three weeks in the U.S., followed by three weeks in Great Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Italy. She loves her Italian publisher, which is owned and run by and husband and wife team named Sandro and Sandra. She said every publisher in Italy passed on The Lovely Bones except Sandro and Sandra "so I think they were able to buy it for, like, a sandwich." While she's touring Alice cannot work on other writing projects, and she prefers to read "dead authors" (like Henry James) because "they provide a lot of solace." Someone asked if touring in Europe is very different from the U.S. and she said absolutely. When touring internationally, she explained, authors are asked a lot of questions about America's politics and actions overseas; international readers are very interested to hear individual Americans' takes on our foreign policy.

Our time with Ms. Sebold was brief, as she had to leave to do an interview with Patt Morrison of KPCC -- "In between the fires, we'll do a little matricide" -- but before she left, she had time to recommend her favorite new book: Mercy by Lara Santoro.