Library Store on Wheels in the news!

Hot on the heels of being named one of Wuztwhat's Seven Havens for Booklovers in Los Angeles, The Library Store made the news again this week when the store's mobile truck (and Mrs. Yeti herself!) appeared on Thursday's 6:00PM news on KNBC 4.

Featured in a segment on a proposed bill to streamline and simplify the permit process for mobile vendors and retail trucks, The Library Store on Wheels was just one of three trucks in the piece, but, they definitely got the most screen time. I think they have the coolest-looking truck too, but, perhaps I'm a bit biased.

Either way, kudos to Mrs. Yeti and everyone on her rocking Library Store team on yet another awesome TV appearance. Keep on mobile trucking, guys!

Posted with Blogsy

The Library Store on Wheels rolls on!

If you think I’ve been busy after my recent bout with Hobbit fever, you can’t imagine how busy Mrs. Yeti has been getting her store’s new Library Store on Wheels…well, on wheels! It’s been a long, hard journey for Mrs. Yeti (aka Christine Romero) and her co-pilot Sarah Lancaster, from concept to actual execution, but, yesterday morning they finally took their award-winning Library Store on the road and Angelenos ate it up!

And we, for one, could not be prouder of the ladies behind the wheel. Sarah and Christine worked their butts off to make this happen, and their artful attention to detail shows in every nook and cranny of this rocking new Library Store truck. Or so I hear. I haven’t actually seen the truck in person yet, but, I do know that Sarah even designed the linoleum pattern on the floor herself! Cool, huh?

The Library Store on Wheels will be rolling across the southland for the rest of this week and part of next week as well, trying to hit as many different corners of the vast L.A. Library system as they can. For a full schedule of which branch they’ll be parked at each day — they’ll even be parked outside Hollywood’s Amoeba Records on Wed. 12/19 — please visit the Library Foundation’s blog here. You can also follow their every move at The Library Store on Twitter.

Greta and I will be touring the truck for the first time today at the Sherman Oaks library. So, if you’re in the neighborhood drop by and say hello. Or better yet, do some holiday shopping and buy some of the fun, eclectic stuff that The Library Store has to offer.

I mean, hey, Christmas is right around the corner…

Joan Didion’s “Blue Nights”

Man, whenever I wanna feel like a total hack as a writer all I have to do is read a little Joan Didion. Seriously, Didion’s non-fiction writing just about kills me. She makes it all seem so effortless and easy, and then, when you’re lulled into submission by the beauty of her words, she hits you with a sudden, painful truth, and a depth of feeling that just totally takes your breath away.

My first encounter with Didion’s work was “The Year of Magical Thinking”, which I read after my sister Brittany died in 2004. Actually, I think the whole family read it that year. We shared everything in that first, strange year or two after her death, books, magazine articles, movies, anything to help make sense of what happened. But “Magical Thinking” in particular — which deals with the sudden, unexpected death of Didion’s husband, author/screenwriter John Gregory Dunne — really got me through some of the tougher times. Our grief wasn’t the same obviously, but, it was extremely healing to read about someone else’s experience with death and from that moment on, I’ve been one of Didion’s biggest fan.

In New York this summer I started reading “Slouching towards Bethlehem” which is beautiful, and I am just about halfway through “The White Album” which makes me yearn to live, just one day, in Didion’s breezy, rarefied Los Angeles of old. Man, that would be the shit. So cool…

So, you can imagine how excited I was to actually attend a Didion booksigning and discussion last week with my sister-in-law, and fellow Didion fan, Laura. My wife worked the event — Mrs. Yeti has a very cool job working for the Library Foundation of Los Angeles if I haven’t mentioned that before — so, she was there too, and Greta, not much of a Didion fan (yet!), went to see “Puss in Boots” with my brother. So, everybody was happy.

Didion read from her new book — “Blue Nights”, a chronicle of her adult daughter’s illness and eventual death, which, tragically, took place just a year or so after the death of her husband — spoke for a bit onstage and then signed books for the crowd. She might have looked frail, but, when she spoke she was just as clear-headed and direct as her finest essays.

They passed a mic around for questions from the crowd, but, I decided to wait till she was signing my book to ask her what her favorite screenplay was — she wrote and co-wrote several scripts with her late husband — and without missing a beat, she replied: “The Third Man”. Ha! A tight, lean, classically great script…of course she’d pick that. How perfect!

Afterwards, we lingered a bit to help Mrs. Yeti and her co-workers close up shop — the event was held at the absolutely gorgeous St. Vibiana’s Church in downtown Los Angeles — and then headed home, eager to dive into “Blue Nights” and hear what the wee one thought of “Puss in Boots”.

I’m happy to report that both the book (which I’m almost done with) and movie are excellent.