Last night,
I went to a prose reading at the KGB Bar. It was my first time going there and
the room was relatively small and dimly lit, and was a very comfortable and intimate
space. The room quickly filled up with people eager to listen to the two readers,
Steph Cha and Daniel Friedman, read excerpts from their books. Interestingly,
both readers had graduated from law school before becoming fiction writers, and
Steph Cha had even read Daniel Friedman’s book and recommended it highly.
Daniel Friedman went first and
first read from his novel Don’t Ever Get Old. He read from the first
chapter of his book for five minutes, in an animated voice and tones perfectly
suited to the various tones of the story, and then decided to switch over from
his book to read from a new piece he had written, which he read from his phone,
which I thought was pretty funny. I enjoyed hearing him read his work because it
was interesting to see how differently the words and tones of a piece come off
when they are being read in the exact way the author intended.
While
Daniel had carried himself with confidence and enunciated well, Steph Cha,
seemed to have a more difficult time doing so. She announced from the get-go
that it was only her fourth time ever reading her book aloud to others and she
was clearly uncomfortable and far less fluid than Daniel had been. It was more
difficult to understand what she was saying and I was less captivated by her
words than I had been by Daniel’s, probably for that reason. Also, she began by
reading for five minutes from the first chapter of her novel Follow Her Home,
and then switched over to reading a chapter, which was further into the book,
after explaining what happened in the first forty pages so that her audience
could understand the context in which everything was happening. I didn’t
particularly like that because I felt like it took me out of her piece, which
was already somewhat uncomfortable to follow because of the low, unsure voice
she was reading it in.
No comments:
Post a Comment