I went to the Neal Stephenson reading at third place books Sunday afternoon, he’s celebrating the release of his new book Anathem. I have read the first several hundred pages of this book so far and greatly recommend it.
I bought this book in hardcover because I’m guessing that like many of his books I’ll return to them again and again, sometimes in hostile conditions that destroy the glue of paperbacks. After the reading, I got on the signing line and had him sign it, which is something I don’t normally do, but it elevated the status of the book from mechanism for conveying a stream of text to artifact, which I find funnier with for his books than generally.
3rd place books isn’t a natural place to have a reading on a Sunday afternoon, and the crowd for the reading was large. Neal’s voice was quiet in the crowd, but carried well. The questions people asked were often more revealing of their personal psychology than actually informative, although Neal frequently twisted them around to convey useful information. A lot of them, unsurprisingly, were about his process of work.
It was a good time, overall.