Jamie Ford and His New Book

Last night was the 4th of 4 nights in a row that I attended author events.  I'm obviously taking them out of order because I'm still basking in the glow of 4 straight.  The event was at the Glass Door Gallery, on Columbus Street, in San Francisco.  It is part of Litquake, 9 days of book-related activities that are taking place all around the Bay Area (from the 11th-19th).  As you all surely must remember(!), I was at the 1-day Litquake confab at the JCC in Palo Alto a few months back.  And that was great fun.  So you can imagine the enormous amount of events that have been lined up for these 9 days.

But onto Jamie.  I read Jamie's 1st book, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, back in January of this year.  It was published in 2009, but it, obviously, took me awhile to get to. I loved it.  I gave it a 3.5 and will definitely have it among my favorite books of 2013.  Now he's promoting his 2nd book (actually, it's his 3rd, but the 2nd one wasn't to Jamie's liking, so he bypassed it), Songs of Willow Frost.  Like Hotel, this one takes place in Seattle. Unlike Hotel, it is about the Depression and not WWII.  Although I have a TBR pile of 20 books that are actually physically in a pile, I will get this moved close to the top as soon as possible.  This is a very good author.

And, besides all of that, Jamie is a very engaging speaker.  He's very funny, in a low-key way, and shows the proper amount of humility.  With all of the author events I go to, I'm always interested to see how much humble-pie vs. ego-pie an author shows.  Jamie's humble-pie was just the right amount.  He read a couple of pages, but not too many, and spent the rest of the time answering questions.  At many author readings/signings, the questions get cut off pretty quickly because of timelines.  In this case, everybody's questions were answered - even the guy who really wanted to just talk about himself but threw in a question at the end of his diatribe for credibility purposes.

There were 40-50 people there, and it cost $10.00 to get in.  That got you free h'ors d'oevres (pita with hummus and cookies - a little skimpy, I must say) and the honor of buying glasses of wine.  All in all, a fun evening.  And, Jamie:  Next time you're in town, let's get you down to Village House of Books.  You'll like the store.