...and doesn't, one hopes, fling it across the room. The Port Townsend Public Library recently announced that The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier, my 1997 book about the Northwest's great geographic icon, would be the featured title in its 2009 Community Read.
I find this both amazing and moderately frightening.
How cool to have your book read by an entire town! It sounds kind of like the plot of a Stanley Kramer movie--whole town reads the book, invites author, then...something goes horribly awry in a way that propels us through awkward/funny situations to a third act resolution in which all involved learn something grand and touchingly human about themselves.
It all happens next month (March), and includes a mind-boggling number of events about Rainier, and mountains, and people's opinions about the book. I'll be there on Thursday, March 26 for a massive star-studded multimedia extravaganza of a presentation but frankly I'm tempted to slip in unannounced to some of the earlier events. There's a "Book discussion group" scheduled to meet at the Hilltop Tavern at 7pm on Thursday, March 10. Now look: I've slung back a beer in Port Townsend. The idea of a posse of critics having a go at your own book around a pitcher at the Hilltop is both profoundly scary and almost irrisistibly enticing. Especially since I've seen the MySpace page for the Hilltop. Which lists the Hilltop as a 47-year-old female. "I am a red brick building..." says the Hilltop. "I have a new beer garden. It makes the customers very happy to be able to drink outside."
My goodness.
Anyway: Come on over to PT next month for the big doings. Couple of really nice articles about it just came out in the Port Townsend Leader and the Peninsula Daily News. The Daily News piece has a massive head shot of me that has me (a) running to RiteAid for some SPF 45 and (b) considering using its gargantuanity as a Fathead poster in our basement.
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The Hilltop IS a 47 year old woman. I should know because at 44, I'm approaching Hilltopitude. Let me know if you decide to sneak into the Hilltop discussion. I'll come too and pretend not to know you!
Posted by: Anne E. | February 04, 2009 at 05:50 PM
Bruce, congrats on this exciting acknowledgment! I wish I was going to be up there to take some of this in. Hope to see you guys in June, though; we are going to climb Adams with my brother-in-law and his son. It won't quite measure up to The Mountain, but it will be a fine entree to NW volcano mountaineering for Kjell. Your webpage is looking fantastic, by the way. I love your typeface. Give my love to Claire & the kids. We miss you guys.
Posted by: Wendy Redal | February 04, 2009 at 11:47 PM