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What you say is "Good morning, Hank, It's Wednesday," On three. One, Two, Three.
I'd like to begin by thanking Tobin [M, T, Anderson] for his speech, and I would also like to thank him for my speech, since many of the ideas in it are stolen from him. So anyway, if I'm not good, it is Tobin's fault,
I am very grateful to be here tonight, and when people get extremely grateful, they can sometimes become gratuitously thank-you-ey, I figure the best way to do this is to dispense with them right away and to cover everything in less than one minute; I would like to thank the Printz committee for honoring Katberines and for all their hard work this past year, I'd also like to thank my wife, Sarah, who inspires everything I write; my fairy godmother, Ilene Cooper; writing partners Maureen Johnson and Emily Jenkins and Scott Westerfeld; and everyone at Booklist. Stephanie Lurie, Lara Phan, Allison Smith, and everyone at Dutton and Penguin believed from the beginning that this book had an audience despite its abundance of nonlinear equations. And speaking of those, I must also thank my friend Daniel Biss, who wrote the formulas in the book and also wrote the appendix, which I think is by far the best twelve pages in the entire novel and is probably the reason I am standing here today. Nothing I write would be possible without Julie Strauss-Gabel, who is the best editor and the best friend an author could ever ask for, Julies commitment to good literature for teenagers should be an inspiration to us all,
An Abundance ofKatberines began with my friend Hassan al-Rawas, Hassan now lives in Dubai, but he grew up in Kuwait near the Iraqi border, and for several years lived with me and two other friends in a small house on the north side of Chicago, During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Hassan and I watched TV pretty much constantly. Actually, we watched TV pretty much constantly regardless, but in those weeks, we watched a lot of war, I liked to watch CNN, because it features-you know-news, but Hassan always insisted on watching Fox, because his primary source of entertainment in those dark days was screaming...