Literary life in Vegas has never been so high-profile. Both the Las Vegas Sun and the Las Vegas Review-Journal offer features on Charles Bock. Bock's novel "Beautiful Children" and also the recently published "The Delivery Man" by Joe McGinniss Jr. are both set in Las Vegas. 

 

I am working on a review of both books for Las Vegas Weekly. It is very exciting to see Vegas as the setting for other than genre novels. Over the years, few established novelists have chosen to dedicate an entire novel to a Vegas setting. It is no surprise to me that this is a debut novel for both writers. The list of masterpieces of Las Vegas fiction, in my opinion, has yet to lodge a single candidate. Obviously, the one book that is considered a classic set in Vegas is "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." But the story is not told as fiction and, even then, Vegas is grotesquely caricatured in the book by an author who is less interested in observing the Strip than in using Vegas as a stand-in for his larger points about America.

 

Anyway, I am vested in this issue because I hope one day to publish a novel set in Vegas. I am not the only one in Vegas with this desire. And like some of the others I know, this fantasy comes with a location attached. The place where we want the first reading from our yet-to-exist books to take place: the Reading Room at Mandalay Place. But, in my case, I took too long to paint my masterpiece. The Reading Room is closing.

 

The Reading Room is the only bookstore on the Strip (unless you count the paperbacks you can buy in resort snack shops or the high-end first edition market). There is nothing on the Strip anything like the stock of books and magazines available there.

Recently I wrote on the Buffet about how I gave my copy of Ovid's "Metamorphosis" to Jay-Z. What I did not mention was that I bought the new translation of that classic poem at the Reading Room. I knew it would be the sort of book the store carried, and so when I next went to the House of Blues in Mandalay Bay, I stopped at the Reading Room to buy the book because the store is right next to House of Blues. I was correct that they had it in stock.

 

The proximity of great music to great books made this location one of my most frequent places to spend time on the Strip. But even when the Reading Room opened in November 2003, I always knew the store was a hard-sell addition to the Strip. In addition to poetry, the Reading Room boasted a strong contemporary fiction section, as well as odd specialty books and limited editions. But sadly, the Strip really only needs paperbacks to be read on airplanes.

 

As with most of the very cool things on the Strip, the Reading Room was a pet project of an important Las Vegas executive, Glenn Schaeffer, who was once president of the Mandalay Resort Group. Schaeffer is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and he saw potential in an area most book retailers thought of as a literary dead zone, the Las Vegas Strip. So, unlike most of the retail shops at Mandalay Place, the employees of the Reading Room are employees of the casino.

 

Over the years, I allowed myself to grow cautiously optimistic about the store's future. The Reading Room is a tiny store, and there is a loyal coterie of locals and I frequently see plenty of tourists when I shop there. I also thought the store would get a lot of help by holding an occasional celebrity book-signing. But even that turned out not be a perfect fit. A UFC fighter recently did a signing in which, to get a ticket, people had to buy their copy of his autobiography at the Reading Room. But he was too popular to actually hold the signing in the bookstore.

Anyway, math always wins in the end in Las Vegas, and selling books is apparently not capable of justifying 1,300 square feet of the  Las Vegas Strip. (Photo by Sarah Gerke)