Alaska is Perfect for Reading

A couple weeks ago, I was fortunate to spend some time in Anchorage, Alaska. While there, I took the opportunity to explore the city's independent bookstores, and I wrote an article about it that's published in today's Publishing Perspectives. Here's an excerpt:

Before Sarah Palin you betcha’d her way into the cultural consciousness, Alaska was perhaps best known as the setting for the hit television show Northern Exposure. The cliche was that it was a remote, distant and icy land, a place marked not by the works of man but, rather, by his absence. The few people who lived there there dressed in heavy coats much of the year and had 10,000 words for snow.

As it happens, in Anchorage at least, there is a lively book
community with a personality all its own — unique, independent, and acutely mindful of their place amid the vast, all-encompassing nature that threatens to envelop them (there is a reason Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild is the most famous book about Alaska). Indeed, with a climate dominated by long, dark winters, Alaska is perfect for reading.

See the full story here.