A fan in the corner of the packed Three Lives David Mitchell* reading last night said out loud what we were all thinking: "I don't know anyone who has read your work who isn't in love with you."

It's okay to talk about him openly here, guys and gals. Last night he admitted that he doesn't Google himself because he's heard it can make you go blind. (Cheeky.) But we know we all love David Mitchell. I've had a crush on the author ever since I pulled Ghostwritten off the shelves because its cover looked like a My Bloody Valentine album cover. As soon as I cracked the spine and saw that first line —

Who was blowing on the nape of my neck?

— it was all over. I've read everything ever since. My fellow bloggers are especially enamored: Jessica Stockton Bagnulo is a long-time fan, and Ed Champion even named his literary podcast, The Bat Segundo Show, after the shock jock in Ghostwritten.

I've never known an author with such a devoted, gooey-eyed following.

Back in 2004 when I went to see Mitchell read for the first time from Cloud Atlas at Three Lives (which Mitchell last night referred to as his "American living room," or "to use the acronym, u sofa"), I met a woman from England named Sam. We sat in the corner, just next to the stool where Mitchell would soon be perched, his forehead tapping against the lamp overhead as he cooed out Sloosha's dialect. Sam and I got to talking while we waited, and I soon discovered that she felt exactly the same way I did about Mr. Mitchell. The two of us giggled and blushed in the corner over how excited we were. She said "I've never been to a reading before. Not just anyone can get me out of bed."

It's hard to explain this to people who haven't read his fiction. What he writes is both charming and mystically complex. Each word seems to be more carefully chosen than the next. Seeing him read in person just heightens the reverence: his voice is soothing, but he sounds genuinely excited to be in your presence. He truly wants to connect to every single person in the crowd, and let them in on the beauty of what words sound like. And they are crowds. I can't remember another reading so packed.

Good book readings are intimate, funny, short but sweet. When you leave, you feel like you know the author better, and it adds something to the reading of their work. Sometimes there is alcohol involved. The best can even make it humorous. Sherman Alexie can do this. Gary Shteyngart can do this. David Mitchell, you bet, can do this.

There's little point to this post, really, other than to get you to join our club. David Mitchell writes good books, and gives good readings. He'll be reading tonight at 7pm from his latest, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, at Bookcourt in Brooklyn, and tomorrow night the fantastic Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene is throwing him a party.

Go. Read. Crush out with the rest of us. Just remember this: I saw him first.

*Not to be confused with the comedian, who is also British, and also lovely.

(Solipsistic, rambling addendum: Is it possible that in spite of not Googling himself, he's read this blog? At the end of last night's reading, all of us sweaty and numb-legged from being crushed into the tiny, perfect space together, Mitchell decided to wrap things up, saying it was so hot he must have "a Rorschach print" on his back. I'm on to you, Mitchell.)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

I find a particularly great thrill in those moments when your adventures—whether through some strange universal coincidence, or through a loose reading of a text—coincide almost exactly with the adventures of a fictional character in whatever book you happen to be reading at the time. It's enough to make you think that this world was created just for you, right down to the books that have been placed in it. (If I were to be diagnosed with a single disorder, it would most definitely and regretibly be solipsism.)

Today on the train I was in the middle of Mary McCarthy's The Group, reading the bit about Libby, the Vassar grad who wants to work in publishing. As I turned the page*, I came to a passage that made me smile.

This put the bee in her bonnet of talking to him about doing translations[…] Libby should use her foreign languages—particularly her Italian, having lived there—to carve a field for herself. She should offer to do a sample chapter free, then, if they liked it, translate the book, setting aside an hour a day for the purpose. The literary exercise would be good for her style, and meanwhile she would be becoming an expert—a kind of technician. Other publishers would send her Italian books to read and editors would come to her to review Italian authors; she would meet scholars and professors and become an authority. In a technological society, Harald said, it was all a question of having the right tool.

Oh, Mary. You have written me into your book, haven't you? And protected my identity by making it Italian instead of Latvian? It doesn't bode well that poor Libby's stumbling block in this ambitious career in translation comes in the form of a novel written entirely in the Sicilian dialect. What will my downfall be? Latgalian?

It wasn't just this book; yesterday on the recommendation of a friend I read Meghan Daum's 1999 essay "My Misspent Youth," and couldn't get over how many parallel lines could be drawn. That same night, maybe spurred on by some sort of warning I saw in that essay, I paid the remaining balance on my credit card.

Do we purposefully read ourselves into the story? Or does the story somehow manage to find us at the right time? Do we relate to Miss Brodie because we too are in our prime? If we had read the same book at sixteen would we have found more in common with Sandy Stranger? Do I often want to say goodbye to all that because Joan did? Or am I already on the verge of saying goodbye, and her essay is just giving me the necessary shove?

Perhaps this is not the case for those who exclusively read hard-boiled detective fiction?

*Accidentally grazing the pate of a man's head with my pinky when trying to regrasp the subway pole; you have no idea what a bizarre and disarming thing it is to touch the top of a stranger's head with your pinky until it happens to you.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

[Isaac Babel's] diary isn't about war, but about a writer during a war—about a writer voraciously experiencing war as a source of material. Viktor Shklovsky, who invented the theory that literary subject material is always secondary to literary form, was a great admirer of Babel. "He wasn't alienated from life," Shklovsky wrote. "But it always seemed to me that Babel, when he went to bed every night, appended his signature to the day he had just lived, as if it were a story." Babel wasn't alienated from life—to the contrary, he sought it out—but he was incapable of living it otherwise than as the material for literature.

 - from Elif Batuman's The Possessed

(If you haven't already, you should listen to George Saunders read and discuss Babel's story "You Must Know Everything" at The New Yorker.)

This past Sunday, J suggested we take a field trip to see the iron men.

He'd heard about the statues—six-feet-two-inch-tall iron castings of artist Antony Gormley's body—years ago, when Gormley had installed them on disused beaches of his hometown in England. Solitary men cast in iron, keeping watch over the comings and goings of ships. Little Angels of the Northwest. When he read that the statues were coming to New York, he clipped the map from the paper and kept it in his pocket until he was ready to surprise me with it.

The actual iron men were relegated to the ground; Gormley had built special fibreglass men to install on various rooftops around Madison Square Park. Apparently the NYPD had to warn the public so that people wouldn't think the statues were suicidal citizens and inundate them with phone calls.

We crept around the perimeter of the park, shielded our eyes from the sun, and spotted them here and there on the skyline, lurking behind old disused water towers, or further up, high at the top of granite towers. Majestic and unexpected, we picked them out one by one, breathlessly pointing into the air, like the crowds spotting Superman in comic books.

There. Look! And up there!

***

Last night, a different event: a ground floor reading and discussion in Fort Greene with Victor LaValle and Maud Newton at Greenlight Bookstore.

I'd only recently finished LaValle's Big Machine, a curious book of faith and doubt, of supernatural encounters with stingray-shaped angels, and the down-to-earth realities of drug addiction and homelessness. On this night, the two writers deftly waded through the murky multitude of topics one could discuss related to this book and landed on the topic of horror.

LaValle defined horror as pushing the reader to feel something powerful and uncomfortable: the gothic stories of Flannery O'Connor, JD Salinger's story of his time at war.

"There are monsters in the book," said LaValle. His editor had wanted to scale back on the monsters, but LaValle insisted, stubbornly, that the monsters needed to be there. His editor eventually persuaded him to meet him halfway, keeping one foot firmly in reality while maintaining that the monsters weren't just in the head of the narrator. LaValle said "I will go with you in this direction, but you have to be willing to lead me there."

When asked where this fascination with horror came from, LaValle said simply that "horrible and unexplainable things can appear in your life and there's no way you can beat them."

Unexplainable things appear in our lives all the time, challenges and questions. What is this I'm seeing? Is it good, or is it bad? What does it mean to me? Will I be okay? It was the same way in the book: when the monsters appeared, to some they were angels; to others, devils.

***

This is how it is with the iron men. Some people might see them and become scared or sad for their implied fate. Others might see them and think of their own moments perched on a precipice in life, ready to make an insane decision, ready to throw themselves into something terrifying, unexpected, or unkown.

But I have a different viewpoint standing on the ground, looking up at these statues. They're not men who have given up on life, but superheroes, ready to leap a tall building in a single bound. Not iron men but Iron Men, waiting for our beacon to call them into action, watching over us, ready to save us from the things we don't want to know, or to remind us of how we can save ourselves.

On the ground, we look up to the sky, shout "there's one!" and point, beckoning others to follow the sightline of our fingers. These solitary heroes on the skyline, pushing us to feel something powerful, something possibly uncomfortable. Something vertiginous. Something altogether unexplainable and unexpected. To me they're angels, horrifying and beautiful all at the same time.

Monsters that need to be there.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

What I should be reading. What I'm really reading.

(See previously.)