4 years of "The Second Life Book Club": 😱📚🤘
4 years, some 200 authors, 4 islands of book worlds visited by tons of omnivorous book-nerd avatars every single day = mission accomplished? Should I retire?
Not sure if I am allowed to post an anniversary thing before the actual date but what the heck: we started the SL Book Club on April 8th 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and authors/publicists/publishers answered my emails inviting big name people on our show sometimes within the hour.
(I later a little post on The Bookseller where I try to explain the concept of immersive book worlds to the unitiated and this resulted in publishers calling ME pitching anything and everything oh my 😆🥹)
Our first round table talk featured SL Huang (no relation), CB Lee, Ken Liu and Matt Ruff on the topic of “Writing and selling books in the age of social isolation”.
And we went from there, every single week, for quite sometime, building a brandnew venue and avatar for each and every guest … in hindsight I marvel at how we did this but then again we were in lock-down, Linden Lab gave me island after island when we ran out of space, and also I don’t have a TV or a Netflix subscription …
A certain yellow duck avatar even made it onto the cover of PC Gamer magazine (and apparently Jonathan Lethem’s kids finally felt a dash of pride for their dad’s cultural cachet).
I am so thrilled about what we accomplished: bringing the joy of reading for pleasure into an audio-visual real-time medium, into the persistent digital world, a realm seen by many (a parent, an educator, a publisher) as the BIGGEST ENEMY to reading.
But to me it always felt silly to rehash the old “radio is killing newspapers, TV is killing radio” in the context of SL because virtual worlds are a social communication medium that not only fosters intentional communities around shared interests within a space that is most often actuall made by the community itself from scratch, SL is also totally unique in the sense that growing for growth’s/algorithm’s sake is not at all important, especially not for us as a micro niche (single-tasking readers of often very big books) within a niche (virtual worlds based on user generated content).
This is a perfect environment for deep engaging conversations across a lot of dividing lines (gender, class, race, what-have-you)….
Well, when I say growth does not matter I am speaking for for me and my Commie peeps! A tech bro trying to scale the concept 100 X thinks about this stuff differently. As do apparently many a publisher of “airport novels”, who cold-called me after hearing about the success of our little avatar hang-out operation, but now I am coming across elitist again am I not so I better shut it …
JournalistAnyhow: now that we - very soon -celebrate the 4th anniversary of this endeavor, I am torn about how and if to continue. The audience seems to love the shift from solely literary events to a nice balance with books about the patriarchy, utopias past/future and of course even leftier leaning bomb-throwing adjacent politics (i kid i kid i kid … do i? below Mike Watson coming up soon 👇)
Why am I conflicted about continuing this wonderful thing? Because as much as I love every single guest and enjoyed prepping their work, I feel I don’t have enough time to just read for MY OWN DARN PLEASURE ALL CAPS!
Roberto Bolaño sits unread in my shelf, next to Franz Werfel’s account of the Armenian genocide next to …. >ARGHHHHHHHH
I sometimes feel I am in perpetual grad school (or back as news director at NPR member station KAZU). Everytime I pick up anything to read, in the back of my mind is a guy reminding me “pay attention, take notes, use post-its, you need to publicly present what you just read, and you need to sound smart about it too!”.
This goes especially when philosophers visit us in-world 😅 …
Sorry Lars, I AM KIDDING (thankfully he and Hans-Georg Möller who is back this Wednesday are very forgiving at my lack of contextual knowledge!)
I know my dilemma is not unlike that of EVERY BOOKTUBER, UNI LECTURER, ALL CAPS AGAIN … luxury problems I KNOW ALL CAPS!
What do YOU think, dear reader: should I fill up every Wednesday in the calendar again (after publicly whining about workload for months), add more live events like the brandnew “What are YOU reading” format premiering soon …
…and should I add a special “Infinite Jest” edition of that informal conversational get-together ….
… WHAT SHALL I DO? SHOULD I CLICK THE ALL CAPS KEY? ok, done!
Well, anyways, THANK YOU for 4 years of super inspiring conversations around the written word, thank you authors, thank you audience!
I still have time to think about what to do with this beautiful MONSTER I created. Right now the plan is to end the show December 28th 2024.
What shall I do? (I know what YOU should do = mark Wednesday 3/27 12pm SLT in your calendar because Hans-Georg Möller is back!
Thank you!
So many people have enjoyed the book club, including me, that I would hope you could find a happy medium of being able to sustain the book club - perhaps on a monthly basis - without it being an onerous task for you. I agree that the unique builds have been amazing but I don't think they are necessary. There is also an lot of work done in preparation by you and a couple of people helping you that might be reduced out of necessity. The bottom line is the experience itself and learning the author's perspective about their work. Drax I sure hope you are able to continue this.
Silver I only just now found you, recommended by someone in world, I certainly hope you don't stop now!