Who are we?
You are preoccupied people. So we will make it quick.
Welcome to Preoccupied. For people who love people who love books.
We are your new go-to source for all things book related in LA.
We are two people (Samantha Dockser and Morgan Messing) who both love to read AND love the culture and world around books. Whether its going to see an author speak at a bookstore, attend a poetry reading at a book themed bar, or cuddle up and watch an adaptation of our favorite romance book, we are there.
But as (this is a mouthful) LA based-book-outing-loving people, we realized there wasn’t a coherent resource that helped people like us maintain a flourishing bookish social calendar. And this was the genesis of preoccupied: we want to cultivate the very resource we are missing. A digital place for people who like doing all the fun bookish things we do, but don’t know where to start with (or don’t feel like) planning a bookish outing.
And obviously, we hope to meet other LA based-book-outing-loving people :)
What can you expect to find here:
Here, you can find weekly updates about exciting bookish events taking place in LA, recommendations on how to spend a bookish day, reviews on events we attend, great LA based reading locations, in person activities for lovers of specific books, date spots for book lovers, how to pimp your book clubs and much more (the Preoccupied pages are still be written!)
So what can we find here that we can’t find on your social media?
Excellent question. Well for one, as readers, we expect you might prefer to absorb information linguistically rather than visually. So we thought you might appreciate a Substack to catalog all of the information on our socials.
But there’s more…
On here, you can find your LA book social calendar every Monday morning so you can plan your week accordingly. We will also include tips for how to put on fun book events, bookish hot takes, and more thorough reviews on various events, event spaces, restaurants, book activities, and more.