I’m a book nerd. I’m a super huge Mark Danielewski nerd. A squeeling, jumping up and down, flapping my wee little arms T-Rex style, über Mark Danielewski nerd. I’m okay with that. I think we should all be nerds about something. I’m such a Mark Danielewski nerd I traveled ten hours on a train to get to Los Angeles to see him. Ten sleepless hours. I’d say sleeping sitting up on a train is harder than it looks, but it’s probably exactly as hard as I make it look. And I spent another ten hours on a train getting home, this time getting some sleep, but only getting to enjoy the company of a Super Mario Bros look alike, who snuck out his acoustic guitar, serenaded his fellow passengers with a stirring cover of Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence,” and then shared his philosophy on the seating arrangements:

—Man, if I was in charge of the seating situation here it’d be dude-chick-dude-chick, man. I don’t want no dude leaning up on me, putting his head on my shoulder, man. Dude-chick-dude-chick. You know what I mean?

Whatever. It’s a sacrifice I’m comfortable making. I love, love, love Mark Danielewski. I don’t think I’ve ever read books that offer more rewards to readers willing to put in the extra effort to make connections, explore themes, and make the book theirs. There are hidden, secret codes. Literally. There’s weird, disorienting, seemingly random text layouts. But behind the surface confusion and disorientation, lies three extremely well planned and executed books. House of Leaves, Danielewski’s first book, is the story of a family who moves into a house only to discover that the house is (impossibly) bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Then a closet appears out of nowhere. And then grows bigger and bigger. And then crazy stuff happens. And as the story gets crazier and crazier, so does the layout of the book. And the pages look like this:

 

House of Leaves is a very self-contained book. Everything you need to crack it can be found within the book. Only Revolutions is the opposite. It forces the reader outward and is best read with Wikipedia close at hand. And whereas the House of Leaves layout seems chaotic and random, Only Revolutions is maybe the most structured book you’ll ever read. It’s written from the point of view of two narrators, whose stories start on opposite ends of the book. Each narrative appearing upside down to the other. Each page has 180 words of text on it. EXACTLY 180 words. So, when the book is open, the reader is staring at 360 words of text at all times. And all this ties in with the book’s them of revolution and change.

Danielewski also wrote a much less known, 100 page novella called The Fifty Year Sword. It’s a twisted little adult-oriented campfire story, basically. There’s also only 2,000 in existence which earns you some bonus points when meeting the author as we’ll soon see.

So Mark Danielewski’s session was awesome. I’ll just say it was everything I hoped it would be and more. And I know that’s corny, but how often do your heroes live up to your expectations? Oh, and he was sporting a big, beefy, Civil War-era quality beard, along with a pair of crutches, since he had torn his Achilles tendon playing a Sunday afternoon volleyball game a couple weeks before. After this session, I was also excited to read anything by Steve Erickson, who was also part of the panel, and whose novels sound pretty amazing. He even got a book jacket blurb from Thomas Pynchon, which if you know anything about Pynchon is pretty huge. After the session, a father-daughter duo ask me about the Danielewski books I was carrying and I got to launch into the gospel of Mark Danielewski with all the faith and passion I should’ve shown as a young Mormon missionary but could never quite muster.

And so, I was waiting patiently in line to get my books signed. At 4:55 p.m., one of the volunteers, a big-wig as far as those things go, judging by her walkie-talkie and somewhat pissy attitude, informs us she will be shutting down the booth at E.X.A.C.T.L.Y. 5:00 p.m., so Mr. Danielewski can only sign one book per person and no personalized messages, please. And so the line speeds up and I’m forced to make a difficult decision. Which book do I want signed? I decide to have House of Leaves signed even though a signed copy of The Fifty Year Sword would be worth more. And now Danielewski’s signing my book and notices I have a copy of The Fifty Year Sword and asks if I’d like him to sign it too. Yes, of course, but I’ll wait until he’s signed everyone else’s books first.

And now Mark Danielewski’s signing my other books. And I don’t know why, but I feel like I should say something to him.

—How long have you been working on the beard?
—Since November. But it hasn’t been work. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it.
—When I was five or six, I was at my grandparents’ house and my uncle was talking about growing a moustache and I actually thought it WAS work. Like a farmer. You’d plant little moustache seeds on your face, and water them, and make sure they got enough sun. Like a Chia Pet. If I’d known how easy it all was I would’ve started growing one earlier.

I made Mark Danielewski laugh. Oh. My. God. I mean, really, if you can meet one of your heroes, talk to them, and not scare them away, I think you’ve done pretty well, all things considered. Not a bad way to end a book festival either.

And so I leave the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books with my geekdom rejuvenated and strengthened. And, despite all the doom and gloom and apocalyptic predictions about the eminent destruction of the book publishing industry, I have faith. With any luck, however, we will see a decline in the bloated, mass-produced, assembly-line-esque book world of authors like James Patterson, who released eleven, ELEVEN, books in 2009, and signed a $150 million, seventeen book contract recently. I will not mourn the death of an outdated, ineffective business model that throws huge sums of money at authors for crappy literature. Then the publisher tries to recoup costs by putting out really shoddily made books. I look forward to a future where people like Dave Eggers and Mark Danielewski are the models. McSweeney’s has eight full-time paid employees. They don’t do book advances. Instead, they put out high-quality, uniquely bound books and split the profits fifty-fifty with the author. We need more book publishers operating in a sustainable way. We also need more authors who take six or ten years to write a great book, rather than authors who spend a little over a month to write a popular book. What we need, really, is more book geeks.