The originator of the modern book reading was Charles Dickens. He adored doing them--he was a kind of drama housewife himself, and his hours-long, one-man stage interpretations were full of the changing of voices, the differing of postures, and the outright, shameless tears of the author at his own words, that put Victorian asses in seats tour after tour, presumably helping the man on his path to immortality. In the century since, readings became the kind of thing where an awkward author stares at his or her book, mumbling into a microphone, while an audience waits to ask awkward questions and then heaps mercilessly hyperbolic praise on the embarrassed writer until everyone goes away. The drama has been completely removed from the equation.

The reading last Thursday, April 21, at Chop Suey, a rock-music venue, was dramatic in a not-annoying, actually exciting way. It was a reading by Jonathan Safran Foer and Charles D'Ambrosio, with musical guests "Awesome," a gonzo smorgasbord of a band, who performed original songs inspired by Foer's books. Foer looked positively glam in his blazer and boyish grin, and his reading style--a sort of deadpan glee at the wonders a mind can produce when rambling--earned the crowd's rapt attention. Part of the joy of live performance is in variations from the text, and Foer riffed on various topics, pointing out the one line in his book Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close that he feels "unadulterated pride for," mentioning that Yo-Yo Ma never responded when Foer sent him a copy of the book, and unleashing a great and hilarious literary bitchslap on the New York Times Book Review (and then hiding behind his book, eyes twinkling with a "Did I just say that?" glow while the crowd hooted with pleasure).

D'Ambrosio, the opening act, was much more of a reader, but an excellent one. His staccato rendering of "The Crime that Never Was," which he read while standing in a weird, blue-green spotlight, left the crowd breathless. In the essay, recently collected in Orphans, D'Ambrosio describes standing in the rain--his skin diseased and puffy, his pants barely lashed to his body--plagued with the unshakably doomed feeling that a bullet is heading straight for his neck. To lighten the mood, D'Ambrosio would stop to take a drink of water and play, joyfully, with the band's theremin.

The Stranger produced the event and hired me to write a critique of it, which of course is suspicious, but having attended over 100 readings--I work in a bookstore--I can't say I've ever seen such amazed smiles after any other author event. The reading even took a swipe at its own inherent pretensions when "Awesome" quizzed Foer with some always-asked book-reading questions. They played quiz-show music and asked in a Batcomputer voice common idiocy like: "Where do you get your ideas?" (Foer's one-word answer, "Google," was one of the biggest laughs of the night.)

Books are one of those things (like gray whales, or a non-ultra-conservative Supreme Court) that have been in peril for as long as my generation has been paying attention to them. Publishers have always been discussed as frightened doe, trembling from the assaults of the modern world. The medium itself (under attack from television and video games in the '80s, by e-books--whatever the fuck those are--in the late '90s) seems always preciously in danger of becoming forgotten, irrelevant.

But dozens of people had to be turned away last week, and the crowd (roughly 350 people, as many as the fire code would allow, dressed in glasses and skirts and scarves and shirts with collars) looked sophisticated and giddy. Someone informed me that it was National High-Five Day, and so of course we all had to high-five often and enthusiastically. Some hot, booze-fueled dance-floor make-out sessions bespoke the Power of Great Literature to Bring Young People Together. Everyone had come to celebrate a book, in a rock club, and it didn't feel like some child's tea party. It felt optimistic and urban, probably the first book reading in a half-century that got lots of people laid.

As the messy line for signatures dwindled, someone asked Foer what he thought of the evening. "Hands down, no questions asked, best reading I've ever done." The bar vibe decentralized the author, he explained, making the audience's relationship to the book most important, because "writing can't pretend to be something it isn't in an environment like this." A gorgeous woman walked up to Foer's table, smiling broadly and tucking her hair behind her ear. She said, "Hello," somehow incorporating five syllables into the word, then thanked him for the evening, and turned and left. Foer looked at me and said, "Nobody ever says hello to me like that in a bookstore!"