What are your five favorite bands of all time?  
Impossible question! Off the top of my head, five of my all time favorite bodies of music are:
    1.    Pretty much anything by the Rolling Stones
    2.    Beethoven’s piano sonatas
    3.    John Coltrane’s classic quartet
    4.    Sly Stone’s album, Fresh
    5.    Prince’s album, Dirty Mind
 
But that list already makes me feel very disloyal to a whole lot of musicians and composers…. 


What about your five favorite books of all time?

 Mostly, the usual suspects….
    1.    Moby Dick
    2.    War and Peace
    3.    Absalom, Absalom!
    4.    The Magic Mountain
    5.    Moby Dick, again….
 
This makes me feel disloyal, too…. 


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Note on the author: Lee Rourke is the author of the short story collection Everyday. He is also one of England's leading young literary critics, writing regularly for The Guardian, The Independent, TLS and the New Statesman, as well as leading book blogs such as Ready, Steady, Book. He is Contributing Editor at 3:AM Magazine and also blogs at Sponge! He lives in London. Lee will be reading at RiverRun Bookstore tonight at 7pm!

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It's true, thanks to Michael Lewis, I can now tell you what a Credit Default Swap is.  The only problem is, I get so angry talking about this topic that it's really best if you just ask me about my favorite novels instead.  The fact that Wall Street is back to business as usual while we here on Congress Street are still feeling the effects of the financial crisis makes me crazy.
 
The Big Short just hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and we are excited to be co-hosting Michael Lewis at The Music Hall on April 7th as part of the Writers On A New England Stage series.
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You can see more videos from our event with Alice Hoffman below: read more

A lot of you have mentioned how cool it would be if we could record our events, so people who couldn't make it get a chance to watch it afterwards. We recently filmed Alice Hoffman. Alice was here in June, and as you can tell from the footage, we had a lot of people in the store to hear the bestselling author!

Click here to see the first video. We'll be posting more of the talk, so check back.

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We occasionally have music concerts here at the bookstore after hours.  If you've never been to one, I encourage you to come this Saturday (that's April 11th) at 9pm to hear Hateful Little Cakes and Subject Bias.

Watching a show at RiverRun is a special experience.  Everyone is there to listen to the music-- there's no espresso machine chuggin in the background, nobody talking loudly and drunkenly into their cell phone.  Everyone is paying attention.

Both bands on Saturday night are great.  Hateful Little Cakes are from here in town, and are much nicer than their name suggests.  They play a kind of folk/electronic mix that I really like.  Subject Bias is out of Portland, Maine, and play well written alternative pop.  They've got great voices and are a really tight band.

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I'm looking forward to Ulrich Boser's appearance at the store this Wednesday, the 25th, at 7pm.  I love books about art, and art theft is always fascinating.  It seems strange that galleries have millions of dollars worth of paintings on display, but generally poor security systems and underpaid and under trained gaurds. 

Twenty years later, there is still no solid lead on where the paintings are.  Although Boser has made some headway in determining who might have committed the crime, those people certainly no longer have the paintings. 

So somewhere out there is a Vermeer, a Manet, two Rembrandts, and several other paintings worth an estimated 600 million dollars.  The largest unsolved art crime of all time.

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I can't contain my excitement over our brand spankin' new literary series that we're launching this week. Martini bars and writers go together very well, and that's why we've partnered up with  The Red Door in downtown Portsmouth.  We'll be hosting a bunch of innovative, talented contemporary authors at The Red Door on an ongoing basis, and we're kicking it off on Tuesday, February 24th at 7pm with comic novelist G. Xavier Robillard.  He'll be reading from Captain Freedom, a novel that is praised by RiverRun staff favorite Christopher Moore as ""a truly funny and energetic romp of a social satire, a terrific send up of not only of superheroes, but the cult of personality in general."

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The Kids Heart Authors day was a tremendous amount of fun. With 30 kids in attendence and 25 adults, the authors took turns presenting their books while kids sat and listened (captivated) or worked on books of their own at the craft table. Our eight authors came with all sorts of unique talents. 

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Media in one form or another, has existed for as far back as we can tell.  The need to share ideas or create meanings has shaped our societies, political systems and how we percieve the world.  In this blog, feel free to openly explore any of these questions or your thoughts and concerns about the topic.   

How does media reinforce or counter dogma?

How does our choice of media (liberal, conservative, green, democrat, anarchist, libertarian, republican, moderate, etc) reinforce our view of the world? Can this range of views promote diversity and a wide range of choices?  How does locking into one kind of perspective hinder open dialogue (the Socratic Method)? How does it maintain it?

What is a meme and how does that relate to the conversation of media? 

How much of the media we consume is a reflection of our state of mind?  

What does it mean to hide behind media?  Why hide?

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