Yes, exactly one month from today (a.k.a. January 8), Love and Other Natural Disasters will be in stores everywhere. You can, in all likelihood, get it even sooner if you pre-order from Powells or Amazon but maybe you want the experience of wandering the aisles of the bookstore. And I hope you do, because both independent and chain booksellers are predicting an absolutely abysmal Christmas-on-into-the-new-year. Wouldn’t it be great to prove them wrong?
As I see it, in a capitalist society, we’ve got to vote with our dollars. Every time we pay to see a movie, we say Yes, let’s have more like this; every time we buy a book, same principle. When we give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, we’re saying reading is important; it has value. So I’m hoping that this holiday season, that message will be sent. And if, in the new year, people picked up Love and Other Natural Disasters and said Yes, let’s have more like this, and maybe they blogged about it, or posted on one of the book networking sites like Library Thing or Goodreads or Shelfari, or recommended it to their book clubs, or talked about it on the train… It means more than you think, at every level.
I’ll get off my soapbox now. It’s just something about Mondays.