The Festival of Books One Hour Before Opening Time

It is six days now since I attended the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which was held at the University of Southern California (USC) campus. By opening time at 10 AM, there were tens of thousands of people in evidence, many of them walking their dogs or pulling wagons stuffed with their progeny. There were even several people who thought I was the late actor Wilford Brimley brought back to life.

Originally, I had intended to visit the Festival on both Saturday and Sunday. After Saturday’s crowd, however, I thought I would spend Sunday far from any mob scenes. It was so bad that I could not see the books I wanted to see from the booths sponsored by such vendors as Vroman’s Books, the Kinokuniya Bookstore, and Book Soup. Those booths actually had lines of people waiting to see what was on sale.

Ever the skeptic, I could not believe that most of these people ever read any book worth reading. Most of the books that people had in their hands were of no appreciable literary quality.

In the end, I wound up spending most of my time at Small World Books’s Poetry Pavilion. A good thing, too! It was there I met Persian poet and translator Sholeh Wolpé, whose rendering of Farid-Ud-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds I eagerly devoured this last week and reviewed for Goodreads.Com.

One effect of listening to all those poets read their work (three per hour) has led me to include more poetry in my reading. I used to be all for prose, but now I begin to realize that poetry is a better way of expressing anything. Not that it’s easy to read poetry, but it is in the end likely to prove itself more rewarding.