From AFP: Library sets up shop on Portuguese beach to encourage summer reading

LISBON (AFP) - With the summer season in full swing, officials in northern Portugal are setting up a library at a popular beach to encourage sun-seekers to read as they tan by the seaside.

The library will operate from two locations along the beach in Povoa de Varzim, a popular fishing port resort town located 380 kilometres (235 miles) north of Lisbon, offering books, magazines and newspapers on short-term loan...

In other news, chats_noirs gets out early today. Movie time!

I’m a bookshelf snoop. On the rare occasions that I’m invited to a party—authors are more interesting in theory than in practice, those who invite me to social functions learn to their dismay—I take a good look at my host’s bookshelf the first chance I get.

Not the one in the office by the computer, filled with collegiate dictionaries and the kids’ textbooks and “HTML for Dummies” volumes, or the hardcovers with virginal dust-jackets placed for looks in the entertainment center. Blind alleys and camouflage. No, I like to check out the bookshelf by the most comfortable chair in the house (look for worn spots in the upholstery, or traces of the family dog to help you determine this), the one that has the recreational reading and tea-stained coasters in easy reach. Hardcovers with the art gone and oil darkening the binding, paperbacks with spines broken by white staff lines, even (horrors!) the odd page turned down, these books tell me all and sundry about the occupants. It’s the next best thing to a rifle through the bedside table.

The sight of masses of fiction, often rounded and yellowing at the edges, relaxes me. I’m among friends. Fiction readers are my kind of people. Intelligent, adventurous, creative—

“Whoa there, hoss,” you’re probably saying. Or thinking, if you’re polite or just don’t like being seen talking to computer screens. “Creative? I thought the authors were the creative ones.”

I’ll take the fifth. I’m one of those boors who think there are only two plots and most writing consists of stealing from your betters and then filing off the serial numbers, as Heinlein used to say.

The story is already in the author’s mind. It’s getting it across the Sea of Words to you that takes something of a joint effort. It’s as though the author is looking at the statue of Michelangelo’s David and describing it to you on a cellphone. Only there’s a lot of static, even in the best writing. The reader has to make sense of it, bring it to life in her mind. That is why I write. Only in this art does the audience take as active a role as the artist.

Perhaps it's not work, but reading requires a lot of mental Cold Cranking Amps from the DieHard® between your ears every time you pick up a new piece of fiction. Look at what’s going on in your head as you turn the page. It's staggering. To put it in movie terms, your’re Cecil B. DeMille and Charleton Heston and the chariot horses and the flying sand. As you follow a story, you’re Steven Spielberg doing the blocking and Edith Head with the costumes, you’re casting and art and music and lighting and sound and stunts and effects and the person who makes sure no animals were harmed in the filming of this picture. You’ve got to summon the vision of Orson Wells and the spectacle of Irwin Allen with the timing of Billy Wilder, all from your imagination.

We as authors like to take credit for our spun gold and fell weavings, but you’re the ones who put shine to the gold and pattern to the weavings. All too often we aren’t even smart enough to throw you a line as you drown in layers of plot and character, choking on subtext.

But when it does mesh, when the words clarify rather than clutter (and frankly, this often is the result of an invisible assist from the book's editor, who also serves as Yenta the Matchmaker between writer and audience), when author and reader synch up like the spaceship and the orbiting station in Kubrik’s 2001, the magic flows in wonder and delight, the words an elegant interface between two minds and two hearts. I’ll stop before I start comparing it to sex, because it would take two pages to list the author’s who’ve impregnated me. And another three to list the names of those whores who’ve given me the literary equivalent of the clap.

So here’s to you, readers:

To your shelves full of broken-back books.

To your minds rich with a shared dream unique to each title.

To your judging a book by a few pages rather than its cover, trying a new author, and following old favorites.

Oh, and the two plots are “someone goes on a trip” and “a stranger comes to town.” Boil any piece of fiction down to this essential gravy and you’ll end up with one or the other.