LATFOB the #BookFest Day One

I really should go to sleep.  I don’t even know why I went to the gym tonight.  Today was really tiring because it was like the book amusement park.  The book theme park.  No, I’m not going to call it the Disneyland of books because there was no admission.  HA.  YOU THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO BE CLICHE and I managed to avoid it.

So today is the first day of the 2013 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the annual big book event in Los Angeles where I’m surprised at how many people come around to look at book stuff and hear authors and what not.  Los Angeles is not a big reading town.  That’s one thing that I have noticed while traveling on the east coast…people with their noses in books (on mass transit and so forth).  And not shallow glossy magazines.  Books that sometimes impress me, the former bookseller and intellectual snob.

Okay, maybe intellectual snob is a bit much.  I can’t even tell you when the Renaissance was but I’m fairly certain it came before the Romantic era.  When was that?  Hopefully before Classical?  Montiverdi before Mozart before Beethoven?  Whose Fidelio was never any good and probably because he wrote it in German.  Friends, if you are writing an opera and you aren’t a megalomaniac, I have one bit of advice for you:  DO NOT WRITE IT IN GERMAN.  Rather, don’t use a german libretto.  The language. just. does. not. sound. like. one. you. want. to. hear. in. an. aria.

Why am I going on about Opera when I meant to talk about LATFOB?  Because I’m tired.  I was walking around all day with bags of books and I’ve come home and separated my books into multiple stacks.  There’s the pile of books in the car which represent Day Two.  There’s the sad stack of authors I could not see because they were scheduled against other authors and events.  And there’s this very large stack of signed books.

I think I’m most pleased about the A.S. King since she won a festival prize so hopefully that means her book is good 😉 and of course I finally got to see Tim Federle.  And I picked up the new Gustavo Arellano book Taco USA (well it’s newer then his other book I already owned, Ask a Mexican).  I got my copy of Beautiful Darkness signed and I kinda regret not looking for Beautiful Creatures but … those are big heavy books.

I just found out that my penguin book mark (shaped like a penguin, not from the publisher) has been tearing up my copy of Rapture Practice so hopefully I can get Aaron Hartzler to sign another copy.

I should really make a list or something.  But who has time for that?  Sleep beckons.

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