“Mon Dieu, a global consciousness, ” I said. “So I’m going to be blamed one way or another for everything?”(Anne Rice, 52) asks Lestat in Anne Rice’s Prince Lestat. It is at this moment that Lestat learns that he is responsible for the possible destruction of all vampires.
Anne Rice finally wrote another book in her Vampire chronicles series. And all old school goths rejoiced. I’m sure a lot of new goths did too. I’ve found that a lot of my friends all read Anne Rice when they were teenagers. And they all still have a strong affinity for her books. Her stories are lengthy which allows us to bond with her characters; taking place in top tourist cities: New Orleans, San Francisco, and Paris. She loves the Victorian period, her Old World characters are always wealthy and living in large mansions. Her vampires are outsiders, which certainly appealed to me. Additionally, she had queer characters, which were the first ones I encountered in fiction. (I was 13.) And her characters were just queer; her books were not about teaching us—they were stories with some vampires, witches, and humans who just happened to be queer.
I’ve yet to read this new Vampire book, Prince Lestat, but it has certainly been moved up in my list of books to read. Anne Rice did a book signing at Books Inc at Opera Plaza. I went with my friend Santino and his boyfriend.
The line was quite long, to the end of the block.
We purchased our books inside and then got in line outside.
We then waited close to two hours outside before making it into the store.
Book signing rules at Books Inc
We slowly moved past the mountain of Prince Lestat books.
And then the mountain of earlier Vampire chronicle books.
At long last, it was my turn to have my book signed!
That was my initial moment of meeting her, I’m quite happy, as you can see.
As she signed my book I felt a bit awkward standing above her just watching and silent. So I said out loud, “I saw you in New York.” But I didn’t qualify that with, at the Barnes and Noble Vampire Lestat blood drive (I worked at that store and received a shirt that proclaimed I donated blood to the Vampire Lestat’s blood drive). So I probably sounded a bit like a creeper, following her. ugh. I was just so excited and nervous and found myself staring as she signed my book. In all, it was probably only a minute, but it felt like a short eternity.
Here we are with our personalized, autographed copies!! All in all, it was two and a half hours in line for our books to be signed. It was definitely worth it.
Here are the people still waiting in line after we had our books signed.
All these people waited to get Anne Rice to sign their books. She wasn’t speaking, just signing. I appreciated the ritual of waiting to see the celebrity author. I enjoyed seeing so many people dressed in solid black with dyed hair. We all love Anne Rice as an author, and we all love her enough to wait over two hours to get our books signed by her.
I have been going through my old books to see what I find. This is the third entry; I’m slowly combing through all my books. Sometimes it’s as boring as a muni pass or a receipt for the book I’ve found it in. Sometimes it’s something more, something I’d long forgotten, something that reminds me of who I used to be, and who I used to want to be.
This project is really fun but sometimes it’s a bit sad. It reminds me of things I’d forgotten, things I meant to forget. I’m not referring to this particular entry, just this project in general. We store things away to hide them because we can’t throw them out and yet we don’t want to see them anymore. And one day we find them and all those emotions reappear just as that item has.
Your book collection is a reflection of yourself, your tastes, your intellectual pursuits, your career, and your circumstances. Your books themselves can be unintentional markers of where you were or what you were doing at certain points in your life. And the items you use as placeholders instead of bookmarks can reveal another level of who you were or are. I started a new project, going through all of my books and photographing what was left in each book. I went through all the books in my apartment but have yet to go through the books in storage at my folks’ house. I started because I found two safety pins in a book. I can’t recall the book (I wish it was something appropriate like Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me but it wasn’t). Regardless, I began to wonder what else I would find in my books.
There were too many items to include in this single entry. I still have more books to add for future blog posts. It’s fun to see who I was and what I was doing when I was reading these books. It’s interesting that many of the placeholders indicate an active social life while I’m sitting at home or on the bus reading a book. I have spent so much time out and about because if I don’t get out of my room, I’ll read or worse, watch tv all night. These placeholders reveal so much more than I remember about myself. Forgotten people, phone numbers. But they also remind me of how long I’ve known some friends, and how many states we have known each other. Whether that be physical states and mental states. They also reiterate the people that I’ve been friends with for many, many years. The ones that have seen me through going to shows like the Toiletboys and going to clubs ten years ago. And the ones that accepted my being a book nerd in the midst of a raging social scene.
So sometimes you just want a good read. A book that will keep you interested regardless of how fun your vacation will be once your airplane lands. A book that you read until your eyes burn and you can no longer keep them open. A book that is unpredictable. When that’s what you want, pick up Charlaine Harris’ Vampire mystery series that HBO made into True Blood. Continue reading →
Goth Grammarist 