Book Club

[ChynnaBlue]

If you've never been, I highly recommend the Texas Book Festival. They are expecting 300 authors this year. The festival takes place on and around the Capitol grounds, which many of the authors speaking inside the Capitol building. Each author does signings after speaking. (You need to buy one of the author's books from the Barnes & Noble book tent or a local B&N and bring a receipt to get it signed.) They also have a cooking tent where cookbook authors do demos and that's always a fun place to be.

They don't have the schedule of events posted yet, but you can see the 300 authors here: http://www.texasbookfestival.org/

Saturday, Oct 17 is also the Lit Crawl - a pub crawl with authors! This is a nighttime event that takes place in East Austin. They always have an author speaking at the Texas State Cemetery and then an evening cemetery tour and authors having trivia games or other fun events all over that part of town. One year they had R.L. Stine, the Goosebumps author, doing a reading in the cemetery.

They don't have a lineup yet, but you'll find it here when they update for 2015: http://litcrawl.org/austin/

[CoCo87]

This sounds like so much fun! I wish Iived closer to Texas. Hubs and I would be there in a heartbeat!

[ChynnaBlue]

Check online - many states have book festivals and lit crawls, so you may have one closer to you that you didn't even know about.

[Sooner]

THANKS!  I wanna go!!!!!!

[ChynnaBlue]

You should go, Sooner! I have been going for years and always have such a good time. Every year I go for a few authors I really want to see, but I also attend a lot of panels and talks as time fillers. I find a lot of new authors to love every year in unexpected places and panels I just popped in to on my way back from something else.

Last year I went to one very early panel just to save a place to see the author that was coming up next.The early panel was a discussion with a dozen authors who were finalists and winners of the Kirkus Review Kirkus Prize. A dozen amazing authors in one room and the discussion was fantastic. I added 6 books to my To Read list and one of them, Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson, was the most important book I've read this year. I really hope they do another Kirkus Prize panel.

If you have a smart phone, they have an excellent app (Texas Book Festival). You can download it for free now and they will update it a few days before the festival. You can use it to plan your schedule and keep it in your pocket. It sends you reminders, has a map of the grounds, etc. They have all this available online without the app, but I found it super helpful to have my schedule on my phone so I didn't have to carry any papers with me.

[Vassago]

A book festival in Texas? Is this a joke?

[ChynnaBlue]

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@Vassago wrote:

A book festival in Texas? Is this a joke?

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Yes, we're all a bunch of ignorant yokels who can't read and the book festival is made up entirely of picture books of cows and guns.

Texas has one of the top 10 book festivals in the US. It was started 20 years ago by Laura Bush, who was a librarian before George W. Bush became the governor.

This year there will be 300 authors. The festival has been so successful that it's spawned a Teen Book Festival, a North Texas Book Festival, a West Texas Book Festival, a San Antonio Book Festival, the National Black Book Festival, and an annual Texas Author Day.

Looks like the joke is on you.

[jaxs mom]

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@Vassago wrote:

A book festival in Texas? Is this a joke?

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Please share with us the bastion of perfection where you live?