Bang bang, the author shot me down

Reasons offered by THE PASSAGE's Justin Cronin in defense of his gun ownership in today's New York Times:

1. I like guns.
2. I enjoy learning about them. 
3. I grew up pretending to have them. 
4. I need to protect my family because no one else will, even though "I am aware that, statistically speaking, a gun in the home represents a far greater danger to its inhabitants than to an intruder."
5. This one time, I was in a hurricane and wished I had had a gun. (To shoot the storm with?)
6. Everybody else in Texas (where Cronin lives) has one. 
7. It's okay because I don't like the NRA either. 
8. It's okay because I'm not a Republican.
9. It's okay because I am in favor of some regulations.
10. My daughter and I bonded over them this one time.
11. It's unrealistic to hope or express the desire for a world with no guns in it. 
12. People on Facebook who want to get rid of guns are meanie name-callers. 
13. My wife says it's OK. 

My picks for the Boston Book Festival

Boston is a city I love and Saturday's book fest kicks ass -- I'm sorry to miss it. (Maybe next year?) If you're in the neighborhood, here's what I would definitely not miss:

• "First Time's A Charm," 10AM -- Justin Cronin (THE PASSAGE), Joshua Ferris and Jennifer Haigh (THE CONDITION) on life after winning a major award. Hubris city?
• "Pop Culture," 12PM -- Embarrassingly general title, but the prospect of David Rakoff and getting to hear Chip Kidd speak again is a major draw.
• "From Page to Screen," 1:30PM -- Dennis Lehane, A.M. Homes and Tom Perrotta on their movie adaptations (if you will... their filmbooks). Perrotta and Lehane have worked on the screenplays of some of their projects, but if I remember correctly Homes wasn't involved at all with hers, though she wrote for "The L Word" for two seasons. (Kind of shocked that trivium stuck to me, but anyway.) Hoping Perrotta drops hints about his next book (2007's THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER was a little disappointing).
• "Home & Away," 3PM -- Bill Bryson and some other dude. I mean, does it matter?

Here's the full list in case you don't trust my judgment (but I urge you do).

Bloodthirsty on the block

Wherever you go this summer you will probably see or hear about someone reading THE PASSAGE, the first volume in an apocalyptic scifi trilogy by the suddenly-hot Justin Cronin. (That is, in hype, not in -- well, you make your judgment call there.) Here's your cheat sheet:

• In THE PASSAGE, a top-secret military experiment called Project NOAH trying to foster eternal life instead creates a virus that turns people into vampires. A little girl is the only one who can save them, aided by a Harvard professor. (Cronin went to Harvard, by the way.)
• If we had all been paying attention in the summer of 2007, we might have followed Cronin's $3.75M deal for the trilogy... indicating that it would either be big or fail grandly. This was just two years after the first volume of that other vampire series hit the bestseller lists, and the same summer the third in that series came out.
• After being on the 'literary' track for several years with the novels MARY AND O'NEIL and THE SUMMER GUEST, he sent THE PASSAGE out under a pseudonym, guessing that publishers would pigeonhole him without looking at his work. (Can't say he's wrong.)
• (This bullet is blank because one of my coworkers just sent me Sad Keanu and I got distracted)
• Time: "Even when as a kid, I was reading these big, fat summer books — fat as a Rueben sandwich."
• NY Times review: "This already-exhaustive book is studded with diary entries, academic papers and other ostensible evidence that its fictitious stories of destruction are true. Every now and then, as when the Gulf of Mexico is described as an oil slick, these accounts are even scarier than intended."