An Evening with Ann Patchett -- Dinner in the Library 2017

[Music] you it's now my pleasure to introduce tonight's featured speaker international best-selling author and pageant you all know her probably from her seven highly acclaimed novels that she has authored including her most recent work Commonwealth as well as Bel Canto recipient of the Orange Prize and the prestigious pen/faulkner award state of wonder the magician's assistant and several others and I know all of them they're all fabulous but just as important is her role she continues to play as a champion of literary culture in 2011 and opened Parnassus books with her partner Karen Hayes she declared after the last of Nashville's bookstores was closed that she had no interest living in a city without a bookstore since the bookstore is opening she has become a strong public advocate for independent booksellers champion books and book stores on NPR The Colbert Report Oprah the Martha Stewart Show the CBS Early Show and many others she also served as honorary chair of the 2013 celebration for world book night spurred by her passion to get books into the hands of people who might not otherwise have access to them and was recognized for her outstanding advocacy by Time magazine in 2012 when she was named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world she is indeed an influential force in the literary world and I'm honored to invite Ann to the stage now please join me in a welcome like you're giving me a little gift hi you're the nicest people and I really enjoyed having my picture taken with every single one of you this evening it's wonderful to be in San Diego and are we technically in San Diego are we technically in La Jolla well yeah I never goes like Wow well I mean really physically we are in okay San Diego proper happy to be here I hope you do feel influenced by me tonight it's one of my big goals I'm gonna talk about something that I've been thinking a lot about lately which is fashion and I'm gonna talk for a little bit and then there's going to be a brief audience participation section right in the middle of the talk and then there will be a Q&A at the end which is always them seriously it's in the schedule which is always the most fun part so recently I was giving a talk somewhere I have no idea where and at the end somebody raised their hand and they said how do you feel about the work of John Updike at this point in time where do you put Updike and Bello and do you think anybody actually still reads them yeah no I made that same sound when they asked me that but I was were really really interested in that idea I am a huge uptake and Bello lover I know and and yet I thought this is really a matter of fashion and I had never thought of literature as fashion before and the fact that there was a time when Updike and Bello were all in fashion and then they started to come out of fashion one of the reasons that I never thought about literature in terms of fashion is because I never read literature I never read in a period the way I always read was kind of like Henry James Henry James Dickens Jane Austen Donna Tartt Philip Roth Marilyn Robinson trollop you know and I just read like that and I thought I was very well-rounded although I look back and think I read almost exclusively literary fiction and I read very little contemporary fiction I mean I probably read ten books of contemporary fiction a year and all I do is read so in November of 2011 I opened Parnassus books with my business partner Karen Hayes in Nashville and that was because the independent bookstore went out of business and boarders went out of business and those were the two stores we had they were both 30,000 square feet and everything in my life ended at that moment but the thing that really changed was how I read I'm in a just backtrack for a second because this is always so interesting to me because it because really essentially because it's not interesting but as an author every time you have a book come out you do a bunch of interviews and people want to know something about you what's the interesting thing you do and when someone's interviewing you and they want to know the interesting thing that you do what they really want to know is how long ago you kicked heroin and you know which you what you did in those years you were touring with The Rolling Stones or when you got out of prison or whatever that's what people want to know and I didn't have any of those things because all I ever did was read and I was an impossible interview subject but then I opened a bookstore and when all you ever do is read when you open a bookstore that turned out to be a really really good thing but I no longer read the same way from November 2011 the way I now read books has completely changed and a lot of this has to do with the fact that we have something at called the first editions club at Parnassus books which is I like to save fruit of the Month Club that doesn't rot and what that means is every month we pick a book and we get we have like 600 people in our club now we get 600 first editions of the book we get the author to sign them and we mail them out we pick the book every month so that means that I am forever reading books that won't be published for another four or five months because I have to get ahead of it and because I don't actually work at the book store that I own I am the only person on staff who has the time to do all the reading because everybody else is working all the time so not only am i not reading Henry James anymore I'm not actually reading books that have been published anymore all of the books that I read our books that are going to be published the next season and I remember so well we had been open for three or four months and we got word from one of our sales rep that there was a really great book coming up in a few months that I needed to read and it was called station 11 did any of you read station 11 yay by Emily st. John Mandel and I it's a post-apocalyptic novel all you have to do is say the words post-apocalyptic novel and I am out of the room there is no way in the world I am going to read post-apocalyptic fiction I am somebody who has read the awkward age three times well guess what station 11 as those of you who have read it know was brilliant I mean it was just absolutely fantastic and it really up ended the way I was thinking about reading flash-forward to last year I was signing 3,000 copies of Commonwealth at the Ingram book distributor warehouse which is just outside of Nashville and it takes a lot of time to sign 3,000 books and you have a whole team of people who slide them and pull them for you which is really fun because now as a bookstore owner I do that like I became friends with Caroline Kennedy because I was sliding and pulling books for her for four hours and you really get to know someone so one of the people they had at Ingram was somebody who was brought in just to amuse me while I was signing my name and after about this sixth hour she pulled out her phone and she read to me something called the read harder challenge by Goodreads and any Goodreads people in here yeah oh you've got I love talking to library crowds you're so good so the read harder challenge and she there were 24 categories and she's reading them on her phone to me and I I nailed it all 24 now you were supposed to read all of these books in the course of the year but I cheated a little they were books that I had probably read in the last year and I I have cheat cards because I wanted to make sure that I got to read some of these to you they were take this test sometimes and they change it every year a nonfiction book about science lab girl by Hope Jaron you guys you got somebody in your life who likes science you like science lab girl by Hope Jaron an unbelievable tribute to trees a book of essays unspeakable by Meagan DOM middle school readers I never read middle school books before I read before I owned a bookstore I didn't read them in middle school they didn't have middle school books when I was in middle school it was a late invention young adult I mean it was like you got to the end of Little House on the Prairie you read Christian Lavin's daughter and then you were straight on to Bella brown girl dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson best middle school reader ever probably a audio book that won an Audi award the holy pulpit these are seriously like all things that I had done a book by or about a transgendered person one of my favorite books last year in the darkroom by Susan Faludi any of you read in the dirt what is that book flopped it was so fantastically good read in the darkroom so Susan Faludi for those of you who don't know her parents got divorced when she was in high school she hadn't seen her father in almost 30 years she gets an email from him that say changes and he then tells her that he has moved back to his native Hungaria and had a sex change operation at 78 this is a bookie and it turns out to be a book about Hitler if you never see it coming it's absolutely amazing yeah see I'm a bookseller okay historical historical fiction set before 1900 Colson whiteheads Underground Railroad a book that I demand every single person in this room read a book about politics evicted by matthew desmond yes any of you yes okay won the Pulitzer friends won the Pulitzer last year evicted now let me ask you another question how many of you read Katherine booze behind the beautiful forevers yeah lots of you you know why because it's more fun to read about poverty in Mumbai than it is to read about poverty in Milwaukee yes challenge yourself for that a food memoir my kitchen year by Ruth Rachel great book about cooking your way out of a depression a book about mental illness this is my last one I'm not going to take you through all 24 Adam has let's imagine me gone which was a terrific novel from last year so I was I was shocked to find out that I could just read in such a wide rain I also read trash now I had never read trash before in my life the rainbow comes and goes any of you read that Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt oh my god so trashy so unbelievably good the fact that Anderson Cooper has not killed his mother we should all bow to his greatness when I was a kid growing up I never thought of authors as living people I thought of them as dead and I had a really profound experience when I was in eighth grade going through my literature anthology and we got to a Eudora Welty story I remember it was a visit of charity and it said 19 own parentheses 1909 - empty space close parentheses Eudora Welty was still alive and it was the first time I saw someone in a book that was still alive and now I am only reading people who are alive and and I'm not even saying that that's good or it's bad but unless I close this bookstore it's probably never going to change but because of this it's the first time I started thinking of literature as having fashion now we all know the different things in our life that have fashion right like for example fashion when I was in college in the 80s I sold I sewed shoulder pads into my jacket I I narrowed the legs of my jeans and I cut all my hair off on one side of my head and I did not think of myself as a victim of fashion I thought that I was living in the present moment everything we do is influenced how we eat how we look at medicine how we look at education how we look at politics how we look at law how we look at parenting when I published Commonwealth it a lot of it takes place in the 70s and there are six siblings and people came up to me all over the country when I was on tour and said these people are such horrible parents they were just shocking and I thought well not only were they not bad parents but everybody's parents were like these parents which is you put your kids outside in the morning and if they came home by dark it was a good day right there were no cell phones nobody your parents never knew where you were they didn't know what you were doing they were doing their own thing I remember once asking my mother to play Monopoly with me and she looked at me and she said oh that's a children's game adults who would never play children's games like what happened to that and and of course anybody who grew up in another time believes that their time was the correct time and what we're living through now is in fact the really weird time so I was trying to put together a list of things that were very fashionable and then we're out of fashion frosted flakes one of my favorites was once considered to be the breakfast of champions breast milk very fashionable and then not fashionable breasts think of the fashion just a breasts yeah it's really changed I mean art our first lady would not be thought of as fashionable say in the 1920s oh oh this I loved I got this from my husband he's a doctor blood pressure did you know that blood pressures fashion has changed that it used to be he said that the systolic number the top number should be 100 plus your age right and I said so what about so so everybody just take a moment I'm I'm I'm gonna be 54 in a few minutes and the idea that my systolic number would be a hundred and fifty four I said well what about the diastolic number he said nobody ever cared about that there was no fashion in that okay things that were very uh things that were fashionable unfashionable and have come back coconut oil eggs electroconvulsive therapy now a round of applause for ect thank you very much so do you know why electric convulsive therapy went out of fashion its One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest first the novel then the movie suddenly the whole country thought that it was savage and cruel to run voltage through a person's brain and then in fact the book and the movie fell out of fashion and then ect came back to from what I understand very very good effect and that is also I like to make a brief aside on that a book that I used to teach back in the days when I would teach I loved one Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest I taught it over and over again didn't read it then for 20-some odd years went back and read it again hated it hated it books don't change we change our response to things change over time going back to Updike I reread those rabbit novels recently in the last couple of years the most unspeakably insanely misogynistic books in the world and I loved every word because they are so brilliantly written they are so fantastic and they are such a such a witness to the age and the time and how we change wait one more thing and then I'm going to open this up for audience participation leeches and maggots both back in fashion do you know this like they were in they were out there back in now alright so somebody give me something here what was fashion not fashion back in fashion shoulder pads leggings leggings the gymnastic pants remember there with the stirrup that went under you're very bad idea bacon bacon all right I live in Nashville Tennessee bacon was in that it was out we were afraid of nitrates right and now you can't get anything in Nashville that hasn't been cooked in bacon and it's very cheek bacon i body suits our body suits back oh god I'm sorry I'm sorry anything else what fascism yes yes suddenly fascism is back in fashion hey laugh all you want friends you think about Oh Marty knees are martinis in and out there in always in are they always in they never went out what about the the era of white wine spritzers all right you Californians here isn't it interesting how we can look at other times and really see what was going on by what we were reading so if I say Dan I don't care if you've read these books or not if I say Dickens you know something about that time instantly the fashion Jane Austen yes right okay Electric kool-aid acid test a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest bonfire of the vanities yeah absolutely the bonfire of the vanities has come back or just the mentality yeah yeah it's true Oh Valley of the dolls yeah the gateway drug I always call it so it makes me wonder what we're reading now that we will be embarrassed about in a generation or in five years Fifty Shades of Grey all right can I just talk to you guys about fifty Shades of Grey for just a minute as a bookseller it is so interesting those books came out right when we open the store and what was so fascinating they were fan fiction and they were based on the Twilight novels and they had been written by this woman in Australia ten years ago and they had been languishing on Amazon like nobody found them then somebody did find them and they there weren't physical books right they were just online but the problem is if you have a Kindle account most people's Kendall accounts is linked throughout their entire family which means if mom downloads porn little Jimmy's gonna get it on his reader so all these people who don't normally come to bookstores were coming to the bookstore to buy porn and it was adorable I it was really like 42nd Street in 1978 you know people really like they were interested but they were really nervous and they were afraid they're gonna get mugged on the way to the bookstore and we actually would provide this service where we would put a plain brown paper wrapper around mom's copy of Fifty Shades of Grey and they all came back you know it's like they would come back and say oh that book was horrible it was so terribly written it was appalling it is the second one here do you guys have the second one the year that book came out every single person at Random House from the CEO to the people in the mailroom got a $5,000 bonus based on that one book so a lot of people say to me you know how do you feel did you sell it were you offended by it and I really do believe that reading is a gateway drug so if you don't read anything you will never read Updike if you read Fifty Shades of Grey if you go into a bookstore if you have a positive experience and somebody's nice and makes you feel welcome and you can say all right you know you liked this book but let me recommend Scott Spencer's endless love a fantastic really one of my all-time favorite novels and the worst movie ever just put that out of your mind but it has a 17 page sex scene in it so you know you can read porn in literature and you can have that positive experience and keep coming back the actually the trend that I've found more troubling was adult coloring books and I have not figured out what the link is but it is direct I'm not joking as a bookseller it went from porn to coloring and last week we opened Parnassus books in the Nashville Airport which was incredibly exciting AAA Airport because I spend half of my life in the Nashville Airport it has always been my dream to own the airport bookstore so I've been going to the airport and working at the airport for eight hours a day stocking and pulling books and they have crummy books in the old bookstore and one of the things that they had was a cabinet that was the size of this lectern four shelves full of nothing but adult coloring books and they're skinny and they said okay we're gonna take this from four shelves this was my job to like 10 inches of adult coloring books because it's over trends over nobody wants them anymore and I got to sit on the floor and go no no no it would open them up and then it could be like okay Birds those are pretty and I would put them they had an adult coloring book of Trump not joking Trump as the Statue of Liberty Trump is Michelangelo's David a it Trump as George Washington Crossing the Delaware I know no Doctor Who Doctor Who coloring books but like thirty of them it was it was really something so the whole question of how we learn and how we change from fashion and from books and there was nothing in the world less fashionable than opening a book store in 2011 it was bucking fashion as much as a person possibly could it was the the gaucho pants of business maneuvers it was the leech and yet because I spend my life going out and talking to readers I had absolutely no doubt that it would be a success and Jack White is pressing vinyl records in Nashville yeah and doing so well with them and you start see everything comes back around save your stirrup pants save your body stockings they will be back in fashion and in fact the independent bookstore did come back and we have doubled in size and we have a bookmobile and we are thriving and the other thing that is wildly out of fashion that everybody will tell you is dead and done and over libraries libraries yeah because what is Google ladies and gentlemen but the big reference librarian in the sky and everybody says you don't need libraries I say this as somebody who has been a member of the Friends board for Vanderbilt library and for the Nashville Public Library for years people who don't use their libraries think that there isn't a need for libraries anymore and we know differently and we are constantly shown how important libraries are for one thing libraries how's the fashioned libraries hold every phase that we abandon and we believe we will never need again libraries understand that everything is coming back and why this is so important especially the eighth floor is because the thing that I see in the bookstore is that this idea that we are living in a world where we can get anything we want on our computer at home with a click has made us more and more isolated and more and more polarized because we are living at home on the little channels that we find that sound like us and what we need is more common space what we need are places that we can come together with our different idea and see each other in our humanity and not be isolated after the election people came to the bookstore we have dogs in our bookstore yeah we have five dogs and you can go to the website Parnassus books net you can go to the shop dog Diaries and you can just look at pictures of the dogs and hear about what they do and when you go to the Nashville Airport and go to Parnassus in the airport there's a giant picture of my dog Sparky on the cash register people came in the day after the election and said I don't want to be alone and I want a dog and we would just bring a dog out and people would just sit there together with their books and be in a space together you cannot take your whole family to anthropology after dinner you need a library you need a bookstore you need places more and more where we can come together so I want to just wrap up and talk a little bit about the books that are in fashion right now and what I am seeing in terms of trends lots of really really important books about race right now white rage by Carol Anderson these are non-fiction books it's a hundred and sixty pages if you take the endnotes off it is the most essential reading for the year Tana he see coats between the world and me Jasmine Ward's fire this time and then for fiction Jasmine worid has a book that just came out called Singh unburied Singh and I think that it will be the big winner this year along with George Saunders Lincoln in the bardo Colson whiteheads Underground Railroad Ben winters underground Airlines those would be probably my favorite books on race that are coming out or out right now books on the immigrant experience have been really important a book called exit West by motion hadid motion and the levers by leave Lisa Coe wakie Wang's chemistry americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and a book called pachinko has anybody read pachinko it just came out by min Jin Lee I had dinner with men recently and she was saying that the book that she could not have written pachinko without pachinko follows four generations of Koreans from before probably from the 20s to present-day living in Japan and it's about the problem of racism in Japan against Koreans she said the book that completely enabled her to write pachinko was the good earth can you think of a less fashionable book than the good earth can you think of a book that more people clamor to get off the shelves and she said she loved it it was it was a book in which a woman looked at people who were not like her and saw beauty and humanity and wrote about them beautifully and it was that story that made me think I want to do more to promote Updike and I who never get the chance anymore to go back and read a classic the classic I just reread this year which was my big treat was Franny and Zooey Franny and Zooey is so magnificent and holds up so beautifully and I also want to put in three books that do not reflect any kind of a trend and those are three funny books because the thing that people asked for day after day when they come in the store they say I want a smart book that will make me laugh that is funny that is the hardest book to find the book that we always sell is Maria simples where did you go Bernadette but everybody's already read it so three books that have come out this year that fill that slot Tom Piratas mrs. Fletcher a book that I absolutely adored called les by Andrew Shawn Grier which is hysterical and of course David Sedaris is theft by finding and it's the very very best David Sedaris book David Sedaris told me that his partner Hugh said that the book should be called David Copperfield Sedaris and it it's exactly right because it's just his journey through life okay I really want to do the question thing and I'm so blind by these lights so shout raise you yes I can see you oh and then the lights just went down as if by magic hi yes of course nori how are you we met earlier at the photo station so my question is you know this is the new great era of television right Netflix they're making TV for these stations so have you been approached is there anything you might consider in the way of writing for TV great TV for exotic TV no typically i and and you know there there are some very weird things about me and one of them is I do not under any circumstances watch television and I haven't since I was in college and by that I mean if the tornado is coming through Nashville I don't turn the television on I don't watch it for anything and I'm so disconnected from that and people are always saying oh the very best writing is on television then you have to I know you don't watch television but you have to binge orange is the new black or what was the one about cooking meth Breaking Bad that's the one everybody's always trying to get me to watch Breaking Bad it's not that I have anything against it it's just I don't have any more time for my eyeballs to do anything except to read I also don't use a cell phone I have never engaged in any form of social media and I've never texted so yeah imagine how much fun that is my last comment is I love John Updike I love Jonathan what's your faces the keys in the bowl the whole notion of the keys in the bowl yeah would that have been my parents yeah oh my god I know I know my area the whole rabbit series the right I mean you don't have to anybody wants to go to graduate school and get an MFA just stay home and read those rabbit books everything you need to know about writing will be in those rabbit books you okay let me tell you something really unfortunate about giving speeches is you have a really good idea and then you get to the end of the speech and you think damn I forgot to tell them that part so I'm going to tell you this thing as a complete non sequitur because it was such a cool thing The Cat in the Hat right the Cat in the Hat contained 236 different words do you guys all know this right all right so this is the other reason to support your library because we are in a political moment where we are operating off of 236 words again and if we just want to keep the language alive we have to support the library okay I just needed I meant to say that earlier it was such a great fact all right oh okay we are recording this so make sure they have a mic all right so Mike person is the wonderful Mariah wait there's your mic yes as a woman writer right do you feel that people like Roth and Herzog and Bello were deeply misogynist or do you feel you can channel their genius ignore their misogyny I can channel the genius and ignore the misogyny yes I can and I think that it was fashion it's kind of the whole point of the talk it was the Playboy Club it was flying Pan Am in which the the stews as we used to call them were six-inch skirts it was a whole part of our culture what I really wonder is where did those guys go you know like did did humanity really change where they just all driven underground but in that time again we couldn't even see it as misogyny we just saw it as the time in which we live in I think one of the most interesting exercises is to think about how we will be judged in 10 years 50 years a hundred years what will people look back on this civilization and say like we look back on the Updike novels I cannot believe that they thought this was ok and I was I was part of a discussion in Italy last summer and one of the people who was there was a guy named Kola me Anthony Appiah and the reason that you know Anthony Appiah is because he is the ethicist in the New York Times Sunday magazine but he's also one of the greatest philosophers that we have in this country right now and he's at Princeton and he said there are three categories by which we will be judged a hundred years from now and it will be environmental rights animal rights and immigrant rights and those are the three things that people will look back on our society and think I'm ashamed that you are my family yeah hi I can't see you at all so just it's alright hi hi so my question is okay in an age where the death of printed books and brick-and-mortar stores had been predicted but has failed to come true what have you learned about readers and the future of the written word yeah well the future of the written word I think is fine but I also think that we need to constantly work at it I am I am basically an optimistic cheerful pollyannaish person which is why I opened a bookstore in the first place but what I was told not only were bookstores did but that books were dead and that people weren't going to want to read anything longer than a tweet on their phone I don't think that that's true but on the other hand every now and then I have reason to go back and read a New Yorker article from the 70s I was writing something the other day they're doing some interview in which I I mentioned Peter Taylor's 1986 novel a summons to Memphis and I pulled up the review of the book on the New York Times website and it was approximately 10 times longer than any review that is run on The Times website now so I mean we're definitely shrinking but we're also again changing and I don't think that it is a steady downhill progression I just think that we're changing fashion and we're growing and I I believe in the written word believe in books believe in libraries believe in printed matter and I think that will keep going on I have more questions about the survival of the species and the planet then I do about the survival of books I think that there's a perfectly good chance we'll die before the books die I don't I wouldn't clap for that because that actually is that's not good news there there are questions here if we have microphones here and there we're there's someone there I'm just like see the little shadow hands popping up I wonder what your opinion is of graphic novels I'm here yeah my opinion of graphic novels is it falls into the large category of things that I never ever thought I would have anything to do with and then I opened a bookstore and now you know graphic novels terrific love them love them more for middle schoolers and young adults for the most part then I do for me although I was a big fan of Alison Bechdel's fun home before it became a Broadway musical I was giving a talk somewhere and I had a ride to the airport at 5:00 a.m. this was years ago and there was another writer in the car and it was Alison Bechdel and I said what do you do and she said I write graphic memoirs this was probably before the bookstore even opened and I thought graphic memoirs are you kidding me and she sent me a copy of her book fun home and when I got it and this is something that's happened to me maybe twice in my life I opened the envelope thinking I'll never read this I looked at the first page i sat down and I didn't stand up until I was finished Jules Pfeiffer's last graphic memoir about killing my mother was also very good and speaking of wonderful graphic memoirs about killing my mother ra's chests can we talk about something more pleasant unbelievable unbelievabl book anytime you think I don't like X something will be delivered to you to show why you don't like it I had a religion teacher in college al Sadler may may God rest al sadler who used to say that prejudice was simplification because if you could cut out one whole group then you would have so much more time because you would never have to think specifically of anything or any person in that group so you could have a prejudice against graphic novels I don't like post-apocalyptic fiction I don't like westerns I don't like science fiction I don't like graphic novels all that means is you just don't have to look you don't have to read them and then once you know that you feel stupid and you start reading them good they're close they can both have a question hi lover and of course I'm referring to bel canto and you write incredibly perceptive ly I believe about singing and there's a scene in the in in the book where you talk about the priest actually here's the main character singing for the first time and I'm curious if there is a singer or an experience that you had that sort of related to that that section in the book when I wrote they'll canto I knew absolutely nothing about opera and I took a crash course that I set myself on I found a wonderful book by Fred Plotkin called how to fall in love with opera which is the best introduction to opera ever the wonderful HD broadcasts were not yet in play you guys have a wonderful opera company but in Nashville we don't so I I did it in a very slipshod sort of way that I taught myself as much as I could about opera that said now I love opera I go to opera all the time and I hang out with my girlfriend Renee Fleming and we you know go places together and so I mean the whole thing about me and Renee and opera and Bel Canto people say I wrote that book about her and I even say it sometimes and she says it and I just think at this point it's probably true but I didn't know her when I wrote the book but so many people thought the book was about her that when it came out it just sort happened and an oddly one really quirky little story when I wrote that book and maybe you will know the answer to this question sir the signature op the signature Aria of Roxanne cos in the book was Lou ally and a friend of mine who was my British editor and a wonderful wonderful opera aficionado read the book in manuscript and said you can't use the Aria from low Ally do you know why no because everyone will know that you cribbed it from the 1982 French pop film diva and that was exactly what I was doing and so I said okay give me another signature Aria that is really obscure and will make me look super smart and he said rusalka song to the moon Dvorak well at the time there was only one soprano who ever sang rusalka which is the stupidest opera in the world if you I mean and that is a really low bar because there are a lot of stupid operas but the fact that you have an opera in which the soprano is mute for two thirds of it I find very problematic and that the only good aria is sung in the first five minutes of the Opera but that was the that was the Aria that I put in the book without ever having seen or heard it I just said thanks Christopher and then did a you know search on the manuscript pulled out Lawal he's stuck in Dvorak and it turns out that that was Renee's aria and that was how we became friends yeah yes you sir with the microphone right behind you University was founded by Scripps Institute of Oceanography and I and I love Clive Cussler 's books that are about finding deep-sea treasures and and lost steamers and so forth right and just wonder if you had read them and if you had any opinion about what he has done to interest young people in getting into oceanography you know this is one of those those speeches in which I just blast you with the enormous number of books that I have read and I have never read Clive Cussler and I'm sorry I mean it's just like playing stump the band or something just when you think that you've read it all you realize you haven't read Clive Cussler and and oh I'm going to regret asking and I should ask you in private is he still with us okay good good so I have the chance to read a future Clive Cussler okay we'll all sleep a little better tonight knowing Clive is okay okay I see a bunch of waving hands it's on okay all right so the last question sorry because we're running out of time all right you know somebody's got to take her upstage with a hook yeah so many of your novels end with a signature style of ending and sometimes people seem to be very angry with that ending and sometimes they're perplexed so is it a signature style and is that on purpose and can you tell us about it you know if I was gonna rephrase that question it would sound something like this your endings aren't good and they're irritating to so many of us do you mean to be that irritating or does it just happen no I actually I don't feel that I have a signature style of ending I think that they're great you know I just I I do I I really feel like I end I end a book this I'm gonna make this into a good question okay you ready this is the difference between commercial fiction and literary fiction commercial fiction puts you in the back of the Lincoln town car and drives you there which means if you like John Grisham you're gonna have the same experience as your husband who likes John Grisham those books are not asking and I'm not complaining it's great everybody wants that experience at some point but the book is not asking you to interact with it the books responsibility is to entertain you I always like to point to Gone with the Wind as one of the most classic loved' examples of a book that everybody's gonna have more or less the same experience literary fiction goes back to what I was saying earlier about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest which means there can be a time in your life that you love it and a time in your life that you hate it but literary fiction is like being in love it's chemistry and I bring half and you bring half and it's why you'll get a rave review in the New York Times and you'll get slammed in the San Francisco Chronicle for the same book and your neighbor loves that book and you hate that book and then maybe you read it later and you hated that book but now you love that book I read on a Karenina when I was 21 and I loved Anna and Vronsky so much and Kitty and Levin and the peasants bored me to tears and I read it again two years ago and Anna and Vronsky were intolerable and self-obsessed selfish hideous narcissist and I loved Kitty and Levin and the peasants so much for that to work the writer has to leave space for the reader so that the reader can enter in and have that experience of chemistry I try very hard to always in my books at the moment in which I feel like you have enough information that you can take the story forward the book belongs to you I never read any of my books again I never think about them again they are yours they are absolutely dead to me people come up all the time and say what's your favorite book and I'm like I don't know hundred years of solitude and they're like no no no of the books that you wrote I reads those I have no idea I never think about them the only book that I like is the book that I'm working on so so yeah I want people to take responsibility I want people to have an open place to come into the narrative and then you keep those characters and you think about them going forward beautiful people of San Diego so nice I really really had a good time with all of you tonight especially my friends at my table this is a wonderful library it's a wonderful University and supporting reading and the stewardship of change is always a good thing and I'm proud of you for being here and proud of you for doing it and keep up the good work thank you [Applause] [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 12,166

Rating: 4.8360658 out of 5

Keywords: Ann Patchett, Commonwealth, Nashville, independent book stores

Id: MydRn1OUpFA

Length: 56min 49sec (3409 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 28 2017