I now have the buttons hooked up properly (I believe), and I connected the arduino anolog zero pin to vcc, which seemed to calm the endlessly scrolling "current state = 0" in the serial monitor.
I'm still not having any luck with the led matrix. The test code you posted won't work for me, I got a number of errors when trying to compile it, one of which is that "DEBUGPRINT is not declared in this scope" Am I missing libraries for it? The normal bookclock code compiles and uploads without issue.
I have had success with the test code found on this page, with the outputs changed to match the pins used by the bookclock.
Here are some pics of the serial monitor and my breadboard setup, if they're any use.