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Sean Dixon’s The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal takes its seat at the banquet table in the middle of the venerable great hall of books that exist, primarily, to celebrate a love of reading. Tristram Shandy, Special Topics In Calamity Physics (yes I did just group those two together), The Book Thief, that Allegra Goodman book that I should probably read one day but at this point never will – all of these, in some form or fashion (and my list is sadly lacking, I know, I’m sure I’ll think of a bunch more to add to this list as soon as I walk way from it), elevate the act of reading, and the love of loving literature, to a high art form in and of itself. Even the forthcoming How I Became A Famous Novelist, which will assuredly make waves in the book world for the number of recognizable characters, has, at its snarky core, a love for the printed page. Canadian writer Dixon has that same bookish heartbeat pulsing through The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal.

The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal is a giant, sprawling tale condensed to the barest emotional bones of a story about the bonds that books form, and destroy, between people. The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club is the most elite, exclusive, and eccentric book club ever formed, ever-to the point where their meeting location changes based on what they’re reading, to encourage the members to have fully immersive experiences with their texts. As the book begins, there’s dissent and unrest amongst the group:

“All I know is,I lie in my bed at night, by myself, trying to read some cozy little book, but I can’tread them anymore, because they’re too small, and they don’t matter, and I have to put them down and just get on with it.”

That quote comes from Emmy, one of the initially least interesting members of The Lacuna Cabal who blossoms in unexpected, interesting and truly jaw-droppingly creative ways.

Into this meeting busts Runner Coghill (after a highly-auspicious opening scene involving her crashing through a floor), who proceeds to produce 10 stone tablets as a suggestion for their next reading selection.

From that moment on, The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal is a darkly comedic paen to friendship, love, and, most of all, books. Not to get all Reading Rainbow, but I won’t tell you what the group ends up reading, where they end up or how a little “fitzbot” robot ends up playing a vital part in the story. Linguistically, thematically, emotionally-every facet of The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal sprawls and is loaded with inter-textual references and winking narrative play that’s fun and engrossing.

Sean Dixon maintains a pretty thorough blog about the book over at the Lacuna Cabal-I recommended making your way through the book once, and then checking it out.

Housekeeping

I had fallen way behind in keeping the author mugshots and links current in the “Authors at BGB” sidebar over there on the right.  That’s all fixed up now.  Check it out and make sure you didn’t miss any of these quality interview/guest posts.

Free Comic Book Day & Buy Indie Day

Hey!  Don’t forget that tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day.  Your local comic book vendor, if they’re worth their salt, will be dispensing free comic books all day long.  Woot! – as the kids say. A complete listing of what’s available can be found here.

Atlantans, this means you need to get over to Criminal Records with a quickness.  As usual, they have a full slate of free activities lined up, in addition to the free stuff.  Here’s the haps (via Criminal):

• 1 pm Nathan Edmondson – Writer for the upcoming comic Olympus will be discussing mythology in comic books.
• 2 pm Jason Flowers – Featured artist in Arcana’s Velvet Rope and artist of the upcoming comic Ripped will be speaking about his first experience getting published and about his upcoming comic.
• 2:30 pm Angela Pratt – Will be talking about and signing people up for a new comic creator’s network, the Atlanta Cartoonists Group.
• 3 pm Nathan Edmondson – Writer of the upcoming comic Olympus will be discussing how to get into comics.
• 6 pm Sass Parilla the Singing Gorilla – Do you really need a description? I think the name says it all. A singing gorilla, what more do you need? Yes, he has his own comic.

My daughter and I will be there waiting for the doors to open.

And today! is International Buy Indie Day. What you need to do:  “On May 1, 2009, please buy one book — paperback, hardcover, audiobook — at an independent bookstore near you.”  That’s it.  Govern yourself accordingly.

Update: Wanda just sent a note that her Free Book Stimulus Plan for indie book sellers will send you two (2) free books with a May 1 receipt. Get shopping!

Blogging for $$$

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece claiming that “more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.”  This time, I feared that the esteemed Journal was talking out of its butt.

The folks at Boing Boing, who know a thing or two about blogging for a living, thought it seemed a little fuzzy, too.  They called on Clay Shirky (author of the excellent Here Comes Everybody) to evaluate the claims.  Shirky does a marvelous job of explaining basic statistics (and his favorite statistical distribution – the power curve) and pinpointing how the authors of the Journal article got it wrong.  It turns out that the median income for those bloggers who uses ads/referrals actually comes  about $200 – a year.  So much for making a living blogging.  

Behind the Scenes at BGB

It’s never been our intent to make money from our efforts here at BGB. We’d be happy if this blog ever broke even.  It might help if we ran ads, but I’ve been resistant to “selling out.”  As it stands, our only source of income from the site comes if you click on a book link that goes to Amazon and then buy something.  These limited transactions yield cents that are applied to our overhead.  

Of course, it costs very little to operate a blog.  Our only real costs for this site are domain name registration and web hosting at around $100/yr.  If we used free services available to everyone, that number would be effectively $0.  So it is very possible, with a little effort, to generate some pocket money blogging.  People do it all the time.  For the record, we have yet to come close to covering our puny operating expenses from Amazon referrals over the course of any given year. Accordingly, my “we do it for the love” ethos has yet to be seriously challenged.  

The WSJ article and Shirky’s response raises interesting questions for the recreational blogger though.  Are you turned off by book blogs that carry ads? Would ads appearing on BGB be unseemly?  Would you question our “integrity”?  Do you care one way or the other?  Let us know in the comments.