Jeff VanderMeer and the Future

I’ve never read a single word that Jeff VanderMeer has written in his dusty old "books." Nevertheless, I’ve been lurking around his blog the last couple works enjoying genius posts like this and, much more importantly, THIS.

Yesterday, I read VanderMeer’s Book List with mounting excitement, cheering as he ticked off my favorite books by Paul Auster, Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Nabokov, Cormac McCarthy, and Bulgakov. I’m not kidding, it was like plugging into a saline drip feeding me a heady overdose of my own taste in books.

I had to restrain myself from buying VanderMeer’s books last night because I already have a five-book bottleneck that my latest paycheck and I created at the Strand Bookstore last week. But still!

God bless the Internet for giving me a chance to get inside a writer’s brain before I ever pick up his book, for giving me a list of ten other books that I haven’t read yet pre-stamped with said-author’s approval, and for giving me my soapbox to ramble on about these strangely intertwined mediums.

It’s a backwards and counterintuitive and I'm probably two years behind most of the cool kids that already find all their novelists via a chilly computer screen, but now I’m sold. It's more than just Web 2.0 and synergy and all that, it's changing how I find the people I like to read and I like it.

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