Sunday, January 31, 2010

Last Flights Day - a unique event at a book reading in Scotland -- re FINITUDE by Hamish MacDonald

Hamish MacDonald, author of FINITUDE, a very poigant novel about cliamte chaos in the future, recently did a public reading at an arts event in Edinburgh. He told me that he wanted the event to be a little different and memorable, so he played a game with the audience, first, based on the part in the book -- chapter 4 -- where readers are faced with "Last Flights Day". Hamish handed out some official-looking flight tickets and asked those are the reading where they would go if they only had one last chance to travel, one last flight to use. They filled out the ticket stub and handed them in (Hamish stamped them all with unique numbers), then they handed them in and there was a draw for some free books.

According to Hamish, those are the event seemed to be really taken with the idea, and it helped set up the reading from that part of the book. I think this is a brilliant idea for public readings, and I salute Hamish on a wonderful idea.

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