We have an event coming up.

Like I mentioned last week, I hear some of you out there in the wide world of Blogger-land like to hear about how I choose the events that we end up hosting. I will be perfectly honest with you, sometimes it happens like this:

Phone Rings.
Event Boy, "Hi, this is Tony."
Generic Publicist, "Hi Tony, I have an author that is a perfect fit for your store."
Event Boy, "What day are you looking to put your perfect author in one of the six stores that I babysit? Oh, and what store were you thinking."
Generic Publicist, "Whatever store you think the author would be best in and whatever day you think would be best?"

Did you catch that? See how they have the author that is a perfect for my store but they want me to pick the store and the day that will be the best. If the author was a perfect fit for my store, why do I have to try and fit them in? More often than not, I am trying to fill in an event calendar just as much as they are trying to get an author booked in a store, so I give in and try to make the best fit possible. Sometimes the author has written the greatest book ever about the discussions between flatworms on the bottom of the ocean. A riveting read to be sure, but not something that is going to bring out 50 or 60 people, it might bring out one or two but one or two people doesn't make for a good event. Events are hard enough to predict without the books being about flatworms.

So I pick out the store that I think will work best for the subject of the book. For example, if the book is about the Civil War, I would put the book out in Old Town. The people there are big on history, Civil War, boats and for some reason, dogs. They go crazy for dogs out there. If the book is about music, think-tank stuff or literature, then I would say Dupont Circle. Law stuff and famous people go to The Lansburgh/Penn Quarter or Arlington/Courthouse, and so on. And then there's our new Crystal City store, still evolving.

So that is how things happen sometimes.

Then again, sometimes it goes a different way. Sometimes I read a book that gets to me. A book that touches something inside me and makes me want to host an event for that author.

The book I want to tell you about is one of those books. Remember when we were kids and the nice teachers in our grade school said we had to read a great work of American fiction? To most of us, that meant Huck Finn. I had received the book some years earlier from my Grandmother on my Father's side. She was kind of the distant Grandmother, the early black sheep of her family I imagine. She was married, divorced, ran off to be a truck driver, I think, then came back to Idaho and remarried. She smoked like a chimney, I am certain she drank a bit and she painted. There were one or two paintings around the house that she had done that I used to stare at for hours. Anyway, she bought me Huck Finn when I was too young to really understand it. Given that I was too young to understand it, I ended up drawing on the pictures in the book. Later on, I was ashamed of drawing in my nice book and I threw it away. Huh, I had forgotten that part until just now.

So I had the book, and I had read the book, but I didn't understand all of what was happening in it.

This is where most of us come into the story. We read the book because we had to and them dismissed it.

I didn't dismiss it though, I read it and started to wonder about the other people in the book. If we were going to get the chance to read about Tom Sawyer, why weren't we going to find out about Widow Douglas? What about Jim and Miss Watson and Pap Finn? What happened to Pap Finn to make him spend his days in a jug of Moonshine? Ah, Pap. Why did you drink so much? What sort of thing could you have done that made you want to hide in a bottle for all time. Why was the Devil chasing you Pap?

Well, guess what? Someone wrote a book about Pap Finn. That someone is Jon Clinch.

Jon has come up with a great story about Pap in all his Whiskey-Soaked glory, that doesn't give it all away about Pap, but it fills in some of the gaps that Twain left us with. Jon has agreed to come around to our new Crystal City location on the 26th of February and talk about Pap. I am going to go out there and hear what he has to say. I would love you all to join me.

Toss aside all that post-pubescent baggage and think back to when you were twelve years old and just wanted to read a book. Maybe you didn't want to read it but someone said you had to. Well, I am saying you have to. Read the book, get lost in the story, write up the book report and bring it to me at Crystal City.
I will look forward to seeing you all there. If you are all good, I might even bring along some of Bliss' forty-rod.