This week we're reprinting pieces from 110/110 (Shelf Awareness,
January 4, 2010), the book that contains 110-word contributions from
110 authors, poets and graphic novelists on the occasion of the 110th
anniversary of University Book Store, Seattle, Wash., which falls this
Sunday, January 10. Our fifth and last excerpt is the piece by Jim
Lynch, whose first novel, The Highest Tide, won the Pacific Northwest
Booksellers Award. He lives with his wife and their daughter in
Olympia, Wash.
University Book Store helped fix the writing fantasy in my mind during my first and favorite year of college. I prowled the Ave for used records and books, skipped classes to read novels, and crashed every party I could find as this crazed notion of being a novelist bloomed. I copied down my favorite sentences by Kesey, Fitzgerald, Chandler, Didion, and Robbins, hoping the brilliance would rub off, then stood in a line that spilled onto the sidewalk to meet the whacko-genius himself, Tom Robbins, smiling beneath his mustache inside this book store, signing copies of his rowdy novels for beautiful giggling women. Nothing looked more fun than being him.