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I consider myself something of an expert on parades; after all, I was the Grand Marshal of the Meeteetse Labor Day parade. Meeteetse is a wonderful little town in the western part of Wyoming with a population of about three-hundred and fifty. It's the place where I did my debut library event when my first novel, The Cold Dish, was published. When they first asked about the parade, I said no, thinking I was over-stepping my bounds by taking such an illustrious position-but they explained that the parade was only three blocks long and was so much fun that they usually circled back around and did another lap.

I never had such a good time in my life, and I have to admit that it changed my entire perspective on parades. Most of the parades I've witnessed have been in uniform, and there are sixteen parades in New York every year. I know because I worked practically all of them as a young patrolman. There are the ones that everybody knows about because they're on holidays or because people grew up watching them on TV back when there were only three channels. New Year's Day is a biggie along with Thanksgiving where I once saw twenty guys get lifted about ten feet off the ground because Underdog got an unexpected tailwind. But there are also the ones that nobody's heard of.

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Craig Johnson is our guest blogger during the week of March 17th. If you have any questions for Craig Johnson, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some brief information about Kindness Goes Unpunished:

Craig Johnson’s mystery series —starring Walt Longmire, the straight-shooting sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming—is attracting more and more fans with its distinctive blend of humor and action. In Kindness Goes Unpunished, Walt’s pleasure trip to Philadelphia to visit his daughter, Cady, turns into a nightmare when she is the victim of a vicious attack that leaves her near death. Walt is forced to unpack his saddlebag of tricks to mete out some Western-style justice, and the result is another action-packed thriller from this up-and-coming star of crime fiction.

About Craig Johnson

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I often get asked what I think about "the future of the book", which is such a complicated question, and so shot through with hidden assumptions, that it is impossible to answer in a few words. It is an important question, though, so I want to try to answer it in a lot of words.

First things first. In these conversations, "the book" is an overstuffed metonym, standing in for everything from the physical object to the viability of independent book stores to that one time when you were reading in the college library and the late afternoon light was streaming in and everything was just perfect. And the only coherent answer that can be given about the future of all those things and more is "It depends." The economic logic of the age is unbundling, and nothing is being unbundled from its traditional context faster than the written word. And once the unbundling happens, different parts of the system will have different fates.

Once you stop thinking of "the book" as both an object and a reference to the current system, it becomes clear that books qua books do some things well and others badly, and the question becomes how to keep the good bits while transforming everything else.