Andrew's Book Club is asking for you to vote for their second February selection. Right now, Terrence Holt's IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS has 37% of the vote, Lynn Kilpatrick's IN THE HOUSE has 63%, but somehow Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in the lead with 146%.

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Book Choy pal Sarah Layden has an interesting, wide-ranging interview with Porter Shreve up at Knee-Jerk.

Here's a brief cut:

What is most gratifying for you about writing fiction? Least?

Most gratifying of all is the process. I love playing with syllables and cadence, zeroing in on the mot juste, shuffling scenes, inventing and being surprised by characters, learning a trade from the outside in, collecting factoids and finding a place for them (Did you know that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died the same day, July 4, 1826? Or that Henry Ford got his idea for the assembly line by studying the disassembly lines at meat packing plants?) I love the research and often hate to let a book go. But go it must, and that’s perhaps the least gratifying part of writing a novel. There’s the ecstatic day of completion, but soon thereafter a malaise sets in. I also don’t like the stress leading up to a book’s publication or the anxiety that sometimes, inevitably, only three people will show up – the bookstore owner, a guy I knew in Social Studies class in third grade, and someone named Shreve who thinks he’s related to me but isn’t – which is what happened at a reading I did in Plano, Texas. I’ve been lucky to receive warm reviews, by and large, but you do feel exposed putting a book out there with your name on it.

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And come see Book Choy pal Leigh Ann Hirschman at her book launch this Friday at Big Hat.

Her new book is LIVE A LITTLE, co-written with Susan Love and Alice Domar.

It'll kick off at six with a reading, and then, according to Leigh Ann, "we will have all the other elements of a fun book launch--spirited chatter, wine, and air kisses (mwa! mwa!). And YOU, my fabulous friends and guests."

*Yes, I know the formatting is all screwed up in this post. No, I don't know why. I don't think it's due to my own technological idiocy, but I might be wrong.