I didn’t move to London so much as ooze there. I had a year of going back and forth a lot. April ’04 was when I actually landed. Now, I’m married to a Londoner and we have a little baby who’s a Londoner, and I’m a pretty happy Londoner.
I used to work out of our place until we had the baby. One of the things about getting my own office – my wife calls it the Mancave – was getting my own Napping Sofa. I have a daily schedule that involves an hour of lying on my Napping Sofa, reading.
Writers need to read. I do a lot of reading on the road. I picked up a book yesterday in New York – it’s a hard-boiled noir detective novel about burlesque called The Corpse Wore Pasties, and it’s quite funny. It’s from Hard Case Crime, which publishes books that look like those beautiful Chandlers you see in Mylar bags in antiquarian booksellers for $500, except brand new – it’s like they fell through a time warp.
Fordlandia, by Greg Grandin, which I just finished in soft cover, was a very, very good book, a non-fiction bestseller about Henry Ford’s very doomed project to built a Midwestern town in the middle of the Amazon jungle. It was terrific.
And before that, the book I finished was Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus. Shirky is a great guy – he’s the guy who introduced me to my wife. He teaches at NYU and he writes about technology and media. His hypothesis here is basically that we have actually stopped watching TV as voraciously as we did in the 20th century and that you can account for nearly everything that happens on the Internet as absorbing the cognitive surplus left over from not watching TV. He contrasts, in a very compelling way, even the most trivial networked activities and shows how much more profoundly engaging they are than the average television-viewing experience.
I got to read a whole bunch of strange and interesting things on tour.
Cory Doctorow is a Toronto science-fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger – the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of the bestselling novel Little Brother. He’s currently touring in support of his latest book, For the Win.
