Amazon jumps the gun on '09 Best list--and includes me

The Best Of . . . lists come earlier every year, and Amazon wanted to very early, apparently, by announcing a series of lists for the first half of the year.

I'm just happy, because I made the "Best Nonfiction of the Year... So Far" list. It had ten books, including COLUMBINE. Their summary:

"10 years after the events that defined an era of school violence, Dave Cullen returns in Columbine to re-examine the details of the tragedy and attempt to unearth the motivations of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Cullen draws mesmerizing portraits of two kids who, through divergent problems, end up at the same point, and reveals how the abundant clues they left in their wake were overlooked."

I'm good with that.

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Wed morning update:

Meanwhile, I thought I was tired of traveling, but then I got a rest, and it's exhilarating to get back on the road. Yesterday, I did an event at Front Range Community College in Longmont, Colorado, way out past Boulder.

It was wonderful. They set up a room with 150 chairs and 200 showed up. They scrambled to get more, and many sat on the floor or stood. That's a much better way to start than 50 chairs and 48 of them empty. Hahaha. It was mostly college students, and they were a great audience. They were fascinated by it, they were loaded with questions . . . We could have gone on indefinitely.

And the conventional wisdom says college kids won't buy books for pleasure, they nearly sold out of the 50 copies the school store brought. That was a nice vote of confidence at the end. And it was great getting to know them in the signing line, where I always talk to long. A lot of them want to be writers, but there were a lot of psychology students there, too, and kids still trying to figure it out--which I can sure relate to.

(Why, exactly, do we keep telling ourselves the lie that humans are ready to decide their life course at 18? How many of us were?)

I can't wait to do more. (Tour details here.) I've got another college crowd tonight, at U Cal-Northridge. (I need to get my butt to the airport in 16 minutes.) Then it should be a very different crowd at a great big bookstore in West Hollywood (Book Soup) tomorrow night.

Then I meet a whole bunch of industry and film people and old friends and new friends I've connected with on the web, and then Saturday is a conference of feature editors and Sunday-edition newspaper editors.

All very different audiences. That keeps it interesting. And it's really cool to see so much of the country in rapid succession, even if I only get to dip in.

I am really excited about my homecoming to Elk Grove Village, IL in about a week, and then some big book fests in Austin and Nashville. I think I'm going to hang out in Austin a few days and catch up with old friends. I love that place. And Nashville, how cool. I've never been there as an adult. I'm fascinated by that place. Maybe I'll go to the Opry.