Wednesday, June 13, 2007

The Yellow Bucket

by Michelle Richmond

Tomorrow night's event at Book Passage Corte Madera marks my final bookstore reading in the Bay Area for THE YEAR OF FOG. Thanks to Bay Area readers and booksellers for making THE YEAR OF FOG a San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller. And thanks to everyone who has emailed me about the novel--from the woman who wondered whatever happened to Emma's yellow bucket, to the reader who pointed out that a minor character was referred to on one page as "the man from Iowa" only to be referred to on the next as "the man from Georgia." She wanted to know if it was intentional. I suppose I could have made up some story about postmodern experimentalism, the relationship between writer and reader, some nonsense about interactivity, but instead I admitted to this woman that it was a typo.

Other things you should email me about if you feel so inclined (to email, go to my website and click contact):


1)Who should play whom in the movie? Okay, so maybe I'm putting the cart way before the horse, but no matter. Who do you see playing Jake? Emma? Abby? Wiggins? And of course, Nick Eliot.

2)Little-known San Francisco spots that didn't make it into the novel. (I'll post these on my blog).

3)Your photos of said spots.

4)Your favorite kind of fog. Oh, yes, there are many different kinds.

Meanwhile, here's a passage from Lydia Davis's wonderful new story collection, Varieties of Disturbance, in which Davis describes a character's experience of reading a book:
At last her thoughts came at longer intervals and she read more than she stopped to think. She then read later than she meant to, gradually forgetting the lamp, the room, and the conference, though the walk remained, as a presence, somewhere behind or beneath her reading, until she relaxed completely and slept...

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