The Happy Booker: Kevin Smokler in the Driver's Seat

We’re slowly getting back into the swing of things after our trip away, so we’re tossing the keys to the blog to Kevin Smokler today, who drops by on his Virtual Book Tour — this time Kevin shares news about his own book, Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times. (Make sure to check out Kevin's many VBT stops today, including a visit with our smart and funny neighbor, BookSquare). Sit back and enjoy while Kevin takes the blog out for a little spin.

Kevin Smokler guest blogs on the Happy Booker

Roxana Robinson's essay "Writing Spaces" from last month got to me thinking: I've never had a dedicated writing space that inspired me. Or even left me alone for long. Living in a series of cramped, urban apartments, my computer has sat in some spare bedroom/office/storage-area-for-boxes-never-unpacked -from-previous-move. The clutter felt vaguely oppressive, like it might swallow me, and my attempts at creation. And while I was an early laptop buyer in the mid1990s, thinking it might free me to write in the park or at the aquarium, it'd take another 8-10 years and the mild penetration of free wireless access in my San Francisco neighborhood, to liberate me from writing in my lame "writing room." Even then, battery life and too many watchful cafe managers have their hands on the controls.

I like to write wherever because that's how I started as a young journalist, notes scrawled on pads flush against a train station wall while trying to remember whether the mayor said "financial" or "fanatical." My reading life however plays with half that deck. The portability of books allows me to keep one in my backpack, another on my night table, two in the car in case I show up early for an appointment. I can squeeze in a minute of reading while laying on the operating table if I strategize. But that's the hitch. While writing everywhere frees me as a writer, removing the ceremony from an act I already bog down with significance, I only feel like the reader I want to be if I plan. Then plan some more.

Bookmark Now (Basic Books, June 2005), the essay collection I edited, has this dilemma slung over its shoulder. How do we fine time to read in 2005 when so much other media, culture and entertainment compete for our time and attention? How do we stay passionate readers (of
books, magazines, poetry and plays) when our Neflix queue numbers 350 movies and our Tivos and RSS Readers fill themselves as we sleep? In his essay "Distractions", novelist Tom Bissell tells of a struggle for peaceful coexistence between his love of literature and his mad desire to play 9 straight hours of Grand Theft Auto. Writer Elizabeth Spiers essay "Andrew Krucoff and the Amazing Paper Weblog" problemizes the question of what exactly reading is when we can be passionate readers
of books, blogs, and magazine amalgams of both. But for me it comes down to two clichés from real estate: "Location, location, location" and "It's easier to sell a house on a sunny day."

I can't imagine myself going a day without reading books but the same day with no movies, video games or radio seems pretty bleak to me also. I'm a certified arts and culture junkie and books are daily pills of choice. Not only ones, just my favorites.

So I keep book everywhere and determine what to read through a topographical map of my day and mood. My night table book can be slow and lyrical because its the end of the day and I'm trying to unwind. Subway and car books can't be too dense of plot because I don't know when I'll pick them up again and may not have 10 minutes getting reacquainted with the story. Bathroom books should have short self-contained chapters because (hopefully) I won't be in there too long.

But mood overrides everything. If a book is exactly what I need that day, if follows me from car, to lunch, to subway and back home. If I'm still keyed up from writing that night, a novel with a long, ropey
narrative won't work as bedtime reading. And some days I just want pixels and play "Splinter Cell" until my eyes roll back. Then I feel bad and read a little of something. Anything.

There's something unique about being a reader now, where I am in my life and in time, that defines this struggle. My generation has had a ring side seat to the largest explosion of media availability in history, thrown into relief by the advent of cable television and video games in early childhood, the VCR wars in adolescence, the internet in college and now satellite radio, TiVo, Netflix and podcasting as we take jobs and start families. Perhaps because it all came so fast, in such regular waves of tidal proportions. I never felt like I had to choose one over the other. As a first grader, Saturday afternoon meant either my 15th read through "Tales of the Fourth Grade Nothing" or several hours of "Missile Command." In good weather, my mother demanded I drop both and head outside.

Today the task of controlling and chose one's cultural intake seems as great as consuming it. I have a carefully curated advisory board of friends, blogs and review pages that know my taste and keep me
informed of books I might enjoy. When I finish a book, I immediately write about it in a small moleskin notebook to have some record, amid the media din, that the book and I ever met. I then give that book a set of tags ("novel", "contemporary", Dorothy Allison"). If I'm good, the next book I read shouldn't have any of those same tags. I then spend a good hour going over my shelves (organized by category and author) and selecting what to read next. Unless there's something that I must read next. Then it's a new game.

Maintaining the system takes time and energy away from my reading time. But it's the only way I can think of to keep things, equitable, pleasantly random, fair. Left to my own devices, I will read whatever
I feel like at the moment I finish my last book which feels like eating a chocolate bar because I just had a peanut butter sandwich. I'll never reconcile the brawling siblings of Should Read and Want to Read but at least this way they're not try to kill each other.

Bookmark Now lands next week and I embark on a cross country tour. I'm guessing I’ll be asked more than once what I'm reading and what else out there is good. I'll answer Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang and The Jane Austin Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. But I'll be thinking "Two books that have nothing to do with mine." Two books that, while selected based on time, mood and geography, will also give me a freedom I will desperately need this summer if I am at all able to be present for those who have supported me: The freedom, whether reading in airport lounges or in strange hotel rooms, to call the time my own.