Author Signing with Erik Larson & Review of "Dead Wake"

So, it's quite the day in Wisconsin today. Brewers opening day and the men's baskebtall team is playing in the championship game tonight. If you're thinking "Gee, I wonder how much beer is going to be drunk in Wisconsin today?", the answer is all of it. We will be completely out of beer by Tuesday. Also a lot of pretty hungover people. As for myself, I will be at work just like any other Monday, because someone has to be! And because we have to talk about Dead Wake! Hooray!

I had built up very big expectations for "Dead Wake". I loved the other works of Larson's that I had read and gobbled his most recent offering down the second my hot little hands got on my library copy. (I had to wait to get my own copy at the signing.) I knew some things about the Lusitania: great loss of life, some cargo was suspect, and that it went down near Kinsale, Ireland. (Though I confess I thought it was journeying from England to American when it sunk, not the other way around; which is what happened in reality).

War was brewing, and though there was some worry (and some cause) about boat travel most people had no trepidation about sailing on the Lusitania. She was a greyhound of the sea, and most people felt comfortable that she could outrun anything the Germans had in their navy. (Which would only work if she saw the threat coming, but that's the thing about U-boats...) And as of April 1915 she's had over 200 successful crossings.

I seriously want to tell you guys everything about this book: the interesting people who were passengers, the acts of heroism & the acts of cowardice in a time of crisis, amazing survival stories, and heartbreaking deaths. There is a passage in the book about people who died putting their life vests on the wrong way and I think it will haunt me forever.

This book is really Larson at his greatest. It's a book that, even though you know the sad ending, has your heart in your throat. I love the little side stories that don't directly deal with the ship, but somehow are connected. It's an easy 4 stars out of 5 for me. Even if you don't pick up this book, pick up an Erik Larson book, you will be happy you did.

And to close the review portion of this post, here is how I feel about submarines now (a tweet from when I was reading):

"Reading Dead Wake is making me scared shitless of submarines. I'm going to start checking for them under my bed if this keeps up."

On to the author event! Mom and I went to Boswell Book Company on the March 24th to see Erik Larson. The books were pre-signed; if we wanted a personalizations we could have stayed afterward but the line would have been at least 45 minutes and Mom and Dad already had to drive an hour home, so we passed. There was at least 300 people at the signing which was a big change from the Ben Winter's signing! They were both fun and good, just very different.  He was promoting his fabulous book "Dead Wake" but also answered questions on his other books too. I took some notes, so I'll bullet point those up for you!

- He joked that he was going to read 28 pages of the book. Then he said that "he would rather have a vasectomy without anesthetic than hear a writer read from their own writing". (He did do some reading from the book but it was not 28 pages, and it was transcripts).

- He loves archives. The researching for his books is "the fun part".

-He says that he doesn't think of himself as a historical writer but a historical animator. He wants to "find the right details that will fire the readers imagination".

-When he's between books and looking for ideas he calls it "the dark country of no ideas". (Sounds like a Bradbury book to me!)

-He doesn't have any desire to write fiction anymore. He has 4 complete novels in his office and "they will never be published because they are terrible".

-He thinks it's great that people want to talk about his books for movies but he doesn't really want to get involved in the making. 

-He never adds or makes up dialogue in his books. Every quote is taken directly from a transcript or a log or some other source. (He was very emphatic on this point)

He did some Q&As, some of which are detailed above. I was totally unprepared but made up a question on the fly and he called on me! Yay! My question was something like "A lot of your material is tragic. When your book is done does it take awhile for you to pull out of it?" (Not a greatly asked question but he got my point.  When he reads about something terrible one part of him is like "Oh thats so awful and tragic!" but another side of him is like "Oh great material for the book!". So he doesn't generally struggle with it. Though when he was writing "Garden of Beasts" he had to do a lot of researching of the Third Reich, which was awful. He said he had a bit of "low grade depression" that his family noticed while writing that one. (Hitler and the Nazis will do that to you!)

There is more but this is already the longest post in the history of ever, so I will leave you with some pictures. (That are all weirdly formatted for some reason)

Book in hand. We were letter "G" for signing.

Made a bookseller take my picture. Wanted to steal this.

Standing so he could see me and answer my question. #short girl problems.

Look between the mom haircuts, he's there!

My First Book Signing

So I went to my first author book signing on 7/16. I was nervous and didn't quite know what etiquette for something like this was so I asked T of Traveling with T for advice since she goes to many of these things. She said: bring your camera, take notes, and if you can't think of something to say just say "I really enjoyed the book!". That is good advice.

The tour was for Ben Winter's last book of The Last Policemen Trilogy which is called "World of Trouble".Here's the post I wrote about Ben's work previously. I didn't write a book review about "World of Trouble" because I didn't know how to effectively write a review about a book that is last in a trilogy without giving anything away. Here's the publisher blurb though.

My mom was my co-hort on this trip, since she had also read the books (I passed along my ARCs so she got first peeks too!). The signing was at the Mystery One Book Store in Milwaukee. It is a (very) small shop that exclusively sells mysteries. I'd say it's about 600-700 square feet. Also the owners are interesting. I will just leave it at that. I don't read a ton of mysteries (or what I consider mysteries, I don't really like putting books into categories. My categories pretty much consist of "fiction" and "nonfiction". ANWAY) so I'd never been before.

Me and Mom are first to arrive (we both dislike being late) .There's no chairs or really any open space so everyone is just standing amongst the bookshelves. It was super informal and low key. Ben was friendly and laid back and it was more just everyone talking, not much structure.

Ben also brought his ukelele which made me laugh because, hipster please. But then he kept doing little bits of Bob Dylan songs which redeemed him to me and mom. He listened to a lot of Bob Dylan while writing the book and almost called one of the books after a song but Quirk, his publisher wasn't crazy about it. Did you know ukuleles are notoriously hard to keep in tune? Apparently they are!

Here's just some notes I took:

-Ben isn't interested in what happens after an apocalyptic event. He was more interested in what people did in the face of certain death. I agree with him. Apocalyptic stories (even good ones) are a dime a dozen, and I thought it was interesting to see this perspective.

-He doesn't think of the book as a scifi book necessarily, he thinks of it as a mystery. But he said something to the effect of "but if you have an asteroid from outer space in the story people are going to focus on that and spin it scifi"

-He also said that his wife only reads the ARCs and not before, because he would be crushed if she didn't like the story because he values her opinion so highly.

I had "World of Trouble" in an e-book ARC so I bought the finished paperback at the store, and had Ben sign that and my paperback ARC of the first book in the series "The Last Policeman". I also gave him the blog's card, which later on I was thinking "that might have been tacky", but I told him that I was going to write up a blogpost about the signing, so hopefully it was informative and not tacky.

Here's the couple of pictures I snapped.

Here are the 2 things that bummed me out a little, and one of them is my own making so I can't complain about that one.

My own fault - should have gotten a picture together. But I chickened out because no one else was doing it and store was small and there would have been no way to do it without everyone looking at us while we were doing it which would have resulted in me making crazy eyes in the picture. Still should have just nutted up and did it anyway.

Second- It sounded like at other signings there was fun prizes or the like. We just ran out of time with all of our chit chat, which is fine because I enjoyed it, but come on, who doesn't like prizes?

So that's my first author signing ever. It was a small laid back affair so I'm curious as to how that will compare to others in the future. I highly recommend seeing Ben if he comes to your town, and be sure to check out his books!