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We had a lovely time last night going to Neil Gaiman's Coraline launch event. Coraline is his new novella aimed at young adults (though spooky-minded grownups will like it too). A recording of Neil reading the book was released on CD a couple of weeks back, but yesterday was the official launch of the hard copy version. Cody's Books sponsored the launch event, which consisted, mainly, of Neil reading Coraline aloud to us. The whole book. Three and a half hours of it.
If you've never had the chance to hear a good reader and author reading their stuff aloud, you've missed out. This is the third time I've heard Neil reading live — the other ones consisted of short stories and didn't run nearly as long — and I have to say he is a really good reader. He comes through loud and clear, he paces his reading well, he does funny character voices without overdoing them, and he delivers the funny bits in a nice English deadpan.
The story itself, I'll try not to spoil; it's a slightly creepy little fairy tale about a strong and smart little girl named Coraline. It's good fun. It's targeted at kids; it might not be complicated enough to fully engage adult readers.
This is about the longest imaginable book that you'd want an author to read to you in one sitting. There seemed to be a definite "I can't believe I ate the whole thing" feel to the event, from Neil answering a few FAQs in advance in order to avoid a longer Q&A afterward (a staple of his short-story readings) to his hasty exit at the end. The massive applause he got when he first appeared on stage, a bit more and louder than I think he was expecting, seemed almost to be thanking him in advance for attempting such an ambitious performance. The reading was held in a church in Berkeley, and while pews offer a bit of lateral ass-sliding space, they aren't very comfortable for long sits, and we were actually packed into our particular row a little too tightly for ass-sliding. The acoustics weren't great, with a hard echo that made things aurally uncomfortable at first, but I adapted after a little while.
Neil's account is in his journal, naturally.
Henry Selick, who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, was in the audience, as well as Neil's kids. Selick's going to be directing the film version of Coraline, starring Michelle Pfeiffer as Coraline's mother(s). Normally I'd be worried about something like that, but the fact that the director was there to sit through the author's reading helps a lot — he now has an additional layer of interpretation of the author's intent to keep in mind. He can't screw it up out of ignorance, in short. How many directors of films adapted from books get to hear the author read the whole thing? I found myself visualizing the movie in my head as Neil read. Should work quite nicely. Nothing will need to be cut, really — a book that can be read aloud in three, three and a half hours can be filmed into ninety minutes pretty easily, I think. It's a pretty visual story.
Meriko keeps threatening to sew black button eyes on me so I can stay with her forever and always. It's like she doesn't understand that (a) I'm planning to stay with her anyway, and (b) I like my damn eyes.