Bleeding and other practices which even in 1840 the medical society said probably contributed to his death. He died of pneumonia one month after taking office. One thing he was sent to pursue was a corrupt political system of warding jobs to the people who are given to your campaigner helped with your campaign instead of the best people. He issued executive order that they would not be allowed to participate in politics or contribute and he did start in that direction i believe that cincinnati ends and americans have really not recognize the contribution that William Henry harrison maine what is probably different about harrison is what you find in that. Of history, a towns person is interested in urban affairs. They do things there. Country people are less likely to be noted. Harrison had 1 foot in the city and one point in the city he brought the two together. For more information on book tvs recent visit to cincinnati go to cspan. Org local content Pulitzer Prizewinning boat michael presents his essays on the book world. Next on book tv. Good evening, i am bradley graham, coowner of politics and prose along with my wife and on behalf of of the entire staff, thank you so much for coming. A few quick administrative notes. Now would be a good time to turn off your cell phone or anything that might be. When we get to the q a part of the session we encourage anyone to ask a question, please try to make your way to the microphone. We are recording this evening on cspan book tv. We would like to make sure your question is picked up on the tape. Before you come out to get your book signed we would appreciate if you would fold up the chair youre sitting in and lean against a bookshelf or column. It is a delight to introduce michael this evening. He has written a book that i have to say is really easy for a bookseller to love. It is such a celebration of books and bookstores and reading. You really know how to endure yourself to us michael. Of course michaels own fondness for books dates back to his childhood. He was a reader as a child and pursued this interest all the way through graduate school earning a doctorate in comparative literature. Instead of staying in academia, he launched into a turned out lifeline career as a literary journalist. Fifteen years later, he won a Pulitzer Prize for classism and stayed another ten years before leaving the paper to become a freelance book reviewer, essayist, and feature writer. He has continued to write a weekly column on books for the post. Anybody who has read michaels columns knows how enthusiastic he is about all kinds of books, not just bestsellers. He has a knack for making others want to read those books. He has authored previous books of his own including a memoir, and a study as well as several selections of essays. His latest book, browsing grew out of the year he spent composing weekly columns for the american scholar website between 2012 and 2013. The collins collected in the book, range widely across genres and topics reflecting michaels varied personal interest. They are also written in his familiar, easygoing conversational style. In running through the pieces, the exhilaration of someone who has spent a life and literature. Michael as you may know is a book collector, he considers book collecting the greatest pastime in the world. Some of my favorite passages are about this insatiable addiction and his frequent and sometimes expensive visit to bookstores. One of the best statements i have heard about acquiring physical books and stocking a personal library with them, michael writes quote digital text are well and good but books on shelves our presence in your life. Please welcome in our presence now michael. [applause]. Thank you brad for that very generous introduction. Can you all hear me . If you cant signal wildly. How is that, better . As some of you know who have come to politics and prose in the past to hear me speak, im a pretty easy aggressive, rambling, disorganized kind of speaker. That will not be any different tonight. What i do recommend, however and what what i most enjoy our questions from the audience. I thought i would talk a little bit about the genesis of browsing, read one of the essays, may be part of another one, maybe say more and then open the floor to your questions on any aspects of books, publishing, the skys the limit. I enjoy interacting with an audience so please do think of a question to ask. As brad said this book began as part of a program of my own really. All of my books have been what you loosely call books about books. I have written a memoir about growing up in a workingclass town and reading shape my life. I have written books of personal essays, and early one called readings which is someone like browsings. Theres a bedside book which is based on my commonplace book which is a notebook which you inscribe favorite passages from your reading. I just chose a number of my favorite quotations and added essays and booklist to it for that particular volume. There is a book called classics for pleasure that came about because i was asked to do a supplement to another book, a book that was important in my own life. I decided instead to write about the next 100 books you should read rather than the great obvious classics of literature. To supplement that with great works of other literature and fiction. I have done a lot of books about books and i was thinking of another way i could approach the same subject. When bob wilson the american scholar asked me to take over his weekly column that William Windsor was giving up. The sensor is the author of other books, he is a charming writer in many ways and other forms. So i thought it would be fun to do but i would only do it for a year. After a year my i would have anything more to say. I did it for a year, i enjoy doing it. This book is the result. I should emphasize these are all like to. Sometimes i have written fairly serious pieces, particularly in a book called, bound to please. These are written as relaxation for my other work. As brad said, i became a contract writer for the paper and also started writing a good deal for other magazines and periodicals including a supplement and a half a dozen others. I have always tried to write a review each week for the post and two other pieces each month for somebody else. I decided to add this to the mix as kind of a relaxation. The essays are meant to be funny. Some are touching, a number of them are rants. It has. It has very little to do with books. In 2012, 2013 year is when we had the Power Outages all around washington for a week. I have a lot of books in the basement, i keep a dehumidifier running all the time. When when the power went out for five or six days, i could picture my books turning to mold and mildew, i decided i would write about this. So it really is a kind of portrait of a writer as a freelance journalist. Someone who is making his living writing about books. My family comes into it to some degree, but also my day to day activities. A lot of the essays deal with book collecting or visiting these bookshops. There are other topics too. I write about the year ive lived in a french port city. I wrote a love letter to my college, which i am a very proud alumnus. There are pieces about all sorts of odd subjects. Paper, cursive handwriting. Let me read one and i will come back and talk some more. Will i will reach just the beginning of the one about handling. It is called scribble, scribble. My three sons, all in their early to mid 20s consigned their names when they concentrate, but that is just about it. During their Elementary School years, chris, mike, and nate were patiently taught the mysteries of cursive handwriting. Since then, handwriting. Since then, they have tapped their thumbs on smart form keyboards more often than they have clicked the pen or pencil. Theyre typing may be well they will never develop a callous on the top knuckle of their middle finger. My own handwriting is essentially illegible other than to myself. After a few days, even i cant i cant make out the meaning of my scribbles. Deciphering my list of important things to do would challenge others far more than breaking the secret of the rosetta stone. Eminent doctors, envious, envious of a scrawl of such complete and all drove that come to me and humbly ask, if i might conduct seminars or offer master classes at medical conventions. I go on from there. That is the tone that i try to adopt. It is easygoing, conversational, kind of funny. Not always, i have some very pieces about going home from ohio and sleeping in my old bedroom in the house i grew up in. What is like to go there. We went to the conversation of the National Book festival which spent the first 20 minutes of talking about lorraine. Here i will read an entire essay called grades. This came about because i was teaching a course at the university of maryland on an adventure marilyn. We started with King Solomons mines then we kidnapped the time machine, and tarzan of the apes, of that on thursday a couple of others as well. I am working on a book about popular fiction in the late 19th century. But grades, how about grades at the end of the semester. The Spring Semester officially entered at the end of this week at the university of maryland. Last sunday may 20, under perfectly blue side seniors toss their boards into the air and went onto open houses and parties to celebrate. I confess that i cant help it but envy all of those smiling graduates just starting out in life, full of youth. When i look back, stop. Lets not go further down that path to a corny commencement style remarks, shall we. My own thoughts of such occasions can generally be boiled down to, best of of luck kids, have fun. I filed the grades for my class last friday. Setting aside marking 35 final exams and as many term papers due in a week, i would say assigning grades is the worst part of being a teacher. Do you judge by performance and accomplishment alone . How im port in his effort or movement . Should we air on the side of kindness or grade inflation . Or insist on it terms of standards, whatever those arse. In my own life grades have always been a fixation. When i was little my report cards were speckled with use, for unsatisfactory. Teachers would say it needs improvement. In high school, i regularly flouted pedagogical authority and would often receive shockingly poor marks. The first grading period of my senior year i earned, and let me stress that verb, a d in english. As for college i struggled for two years to break out of the category of the hardworking b student. I did eventually but by then the psychological damage was done. In any given moment since i assumed everyone around me was smarter than i was, more naturally gifted, quicker witted and probably capable of understanding bigger terms. People snicker when i met that i cant fathom what was met by the world was everything that is the case. They look pity in late when i confess that all of those intuitive aspects of Digital Technology are not intuitive to me. With concerted effort i can follow instructions but dont ask me to simply grasp how to operate a smart phone. My own 20 no kia kia from radioshack has features that even now are mysterious. What for instance is a immediate net. Dont even start start to explain, it wont mean anything to me. Long ago i realized my real talent could be reduced to a single word, doggedness. I put in in ordinance amounts of time if i find something that interests me. I will consult experts, and then suddenly drop whatever it is a move on. For use i ran or exercised every day. I wore size 33 slacks, that is in the waste not the length. Then one day, i stop. Now i am stopped. Now i am embarrassed to get into my pajamas at night. My house itself is in shambles, classic mens clothing, manual tempers typewriters, scores of of thrift shop neckties and quite a few books. Okay thousands of books. Many of them in boxes, in the basement. I have actually got six hawking double side bookcases purchased from borders when they went out of business just sitting in my garage waiting for space to put them in. My wife draws the line at the dining room even though we could easily eat our meals on trays. People can be so judgmental too. I have even heard words of compulsive obsessive and hoarding spoken in my presence. That last sound especially harsh. I really need all these heaped up newspapers in the hallway, okay that was a joke. I have pretty impressive stacks of old issues of the times supplement. You can never tell when you want to settle down with an article of roman coins. Anyway, that is why i dislike grades. People are individual so how can you reduce them to an a, b, or see. Or sometimes to a d along with an invitation to stop by for a quiet chat with the high school principal. [applause]. If you like my review or if you have read any of my books you may like this one. It is a little more personal, a little more washington in some ways than the others but i meant it to be fun and i think youll find it to be fun. I will go back to talking some more but i want to see if their questions to begin with. If there are please come to the microphone and ask away. While you are doing that in thinking, i will give you another sample. , we have a question coming. I guess i will force it into a question. I know if you remember 30 years ago. Do i ever. That is the first job i had coming back to work. I remember up to the desk with the books up to hear and remember he made the clerk to, and the date and the ho biography. I worked there you know. No. You didnt know i work there . I dont need to ask a question that i can tell. When i first came to washington i only came here because my then girlfriend and now wife was here. If you are to spill your glass of merlot on a rembrandt she is the one who would take care of it. She was working at the library of congress. I came here in top parttime as an adjunct at au. I was offered a couple of teaching jobs but in no places that mary wanted to move to such as houston. So i stayed here in washington and became for a rile a technical writer for a computer company. Much of this this can be gleaned from my earlier books. For a number of months, maybe half a year, i worked on sunday afternoons in book market in the corner of calvert and connecticut. This was a really crummy paperback book exchange. He would take anything and exchange, telephone books, high school annuals, anything. My job was to work there for three hours in return for credit and i would get the equivalent of 5 per hour and i would have to take that in paperbacks. It got me out of the house, high like to be around books. Plus, one day a couple came in with five or six boxes of new hardback first editions. Turned out to be alan and pat hearn, they had these books for a wild and hadnt been able to sell them. They were they were essentially going to give them to peter. I doubt they ever found a paperback they wanted. So i was shelving them and looking at them as one does. It was an author from my hometown so i bought it. It was a mint, first it titian, now inscribed from me from toni morrison. Says Something Like for michael, homeboy. So that is quite an expensive book these days. I did make out ultimately at the book market there and connecticut. Are there other questions . Please to think of questions and go to the mic so they can hear them. But i will repeat the question just in case. Maybe you could say more, how is it to be a literary person and a political town . What is it like to be a literary person in a political town . This isnt only a political town. The very existence of this bookstore and the friday books and it shows that in the minds of washington that is one of the great reading towns of the country. Plus, politicians it is hard to imagine i know occasionally do read books. We have all the people who work for the government, often despised by the rest of the country but who are friends of. I know they are readers and serious intellectual people. It is not so lonely. I once thought of moving to new york and taking a job there. An old friend of mine and editor once said to me at the time, i should stay in washington and quoted an old latin take. Better the first man in ostia then the second man in rome. [laughter] so i stayed in ostia. Other questions . I want to ask you how are the titles reviewed how do you select them. The question is how are the titles i review selected . For many years, when when i was an editor and writer, and staffer at the post i was able to pick books i was pretty sure i was able to like. If i didnt like it i would put on my editors had an assignment to someone else. For the past ten or 12 years as a contract writer im able to suggest books to my editors that i would like to review. For the most part they will indulge me. Every so often they will ask me to do a book that i hadnt thought about writing about and i almost always say yes to keep the balance going. When i write for other places, they will send me a book and say i hope youll want to write about this for us. I always want to write about it for him. They are the the best paying market in the country. So for other magazines other than the post, i am usually offered books. For the post 80 are ones i choose myself. In fact it is clear on one extent that washington is that a literary and artistic town in the Washington Post is by clear shot the biggest winner of Pulitzer Prizes and criticism. Whereas it hasnt one for political sorts of writing. So somehow, some white the Washington Post. I trained all of the other pulitzers. [laughter] the weird thing is it is quite a selection, is people who write about movies, music, art, fashion. You have to remember this is the Washington Post. It is one of the traitorous newspapers and they will have great newspapers writing for them. Used to have a monthly conversation. I cherish the book club. It was a Science Fiction novel people could debate mainstream. The citizens undergo sexual changes. They had its interest together. Look at the book is what you need a pic book club. When you Start Talking about any work of art the question to ask yourself is the medical poetry so what species is this . You dont want to judge the same standards. They have different names and goals and you have to understand what those goals are and remember when valentines day the sentence was it all credibility in and they were quite wonderful books. They fit all the requirements of an easy read. They were successful. Think about what species of utterance is. I would be curious to your opinion of covering Foreign Affairs they started out heading off toward. We wish we hadnt gotten involved in all of this. People have written about the release and i can think of the citizen. I do question and this might not be popular having lived in the