Kimberly Emerson

Psst.  Come closer.   I want to let you in on a secret, but you have to promise not to tell anyone else.  I found the best attraction in Southern California, and it isn’t Disneyland.  It is the L.A. Times Festival of Books.

You read that right, books.  Not just books – BOOKS.  Thousands of them.  Oh, and thousands of people, which is why you can’t tell anyone.  It’s crowded already.   If any more people show up, there will be nowhere to park and I’ll have to walk from home.  I could probably manage walking there, but what with all the books I bought, I’d have to take a taxi home.  That’s just a waste of good book money.

Every year, for one golden weekend at the end of April, the L.A. Times sponsors the fair, and turns an entire college campus into a huge bookstore.  At the end of the weekend, like Brigadoon, it fades into the mist, ne’er to be seen for another twelve-month.  But while it is there, oh, the magnificence of it.

Somewhere right now my friend Ann is gleefully saying, “I told you so!”  Ann has attended and loved the Festival of Books every year since its inception in 1996.  (Seriously.  She once missed a few hours on Saturday morning to attend our church’s flower festival, the time the United Methodist Women named her Woman of the Year.  Even then, it was a close call.)  For most of those years – at least the ones where I lived within the near hundred miles – she tried to persuade me to go with her.  As one of the original readers for the first draft of both my books, she knew full well how much I love the written word.  Acres of books, along with many of the people who wrote them?  What was not to like?

It was probably the teeming masses of humanity that put me off.  Some 140,000 people attend this literary carnival.  In case you weren’t paying attention to that last sentence, that’s a lot of people.  I wouldn’t call myself a loner, but I definitely favor intimate gatherings.  Events involving crowd control, port-a-potties and phrases like “remember where we parked” leave me at best lukewarm, if not actually cold.  For years, I wished her well and found something else to do that weekend.

Then one April, I went with her to get tickets for the Festival.  No, you don’t actually need a ticket to get in.  You do, however, need a ticket to attend one of the many talks they host.  The tickets are $1.00 apiece.  They only sell them because there’s a limit to the number of people the rooms can hold, and it’s a way for the coordinators of the event to manage how many people sit in.  That happened to be the year that they handed out tickets at Macy’s, for some reason I don’t recall.   We waited in a very short line for four hours.  (The ticket distribution method used that year was, in a word, bad.  To their credit, the organizers never did it that way again.)  Anyhow, during the hours – and hours – we sat on the vinyl tile (cold and uncomfortable, hooray), I got a really good look at the list of panels and open stages held over the two days, and started to think it might be worth my while to go.

Last year, I finally decided it was time.  I knew Ann would want to be there from opening to closing, and I wasn’t sure about committing myself to that.  She assured me that there was a convenient bus route from UCLA, where the 2010 festival was held, to her house.  If I wanted to leave, she’d be fine on her own.

We got there close to when it opened, but plenty of people still beat us.  Booths covered every spare walkway of the campus, with books on all subjects imaginable.  We strolled through the health section, where vendors offered us everything from literature on the latest in chemotherapy to recipe books for herbal medicine.  Several tables were covered only in books by local authors, telling tales of L.A. history and folklore.  The Children’s section went on for miles, and I happened on a graphic novel that looked just a little older than the reading level of my nephews.  (I googled the difference between graphic novels and comic books – my favorite response was “about $10.00” – and the term graphic novel seems to describe it best, a story in pictures that has a complete arc in one book.)  The artist was on hand to dedicate books to loved ones.  I bought one and had him personalize for the boys, so that they could have it the following Christmas.  After a hasty lunch – food comes in a decided second when there are so many books around – we happened on the mystery section.  I love mysteries.  It comes naturally, my parents both love them too.  (We watched only G-rated movies in our house, but books with cover pictures of knives dripping blood could be found in great numbers.)  I bought two by authors I hadn’t heard of before, one for myself and one to give to my mom (after I read it, of course).  Finally, after strolling through the cooking section and checking out the recipes that came with mood music, we stopped in at one of the stages and listened to something called “Three-Minute Stories.”  It was just as described – local radio show hosts and the occasional celebrity reading short stories.  I was mesmerized.   We left shortly before someone would have thrown us out, I think.

After such an experience, I called my mother – former teacher and librarian – and informed her to mark her calendar for 2011, because she had to come down for this.  I even bought her a tote bag bearing the Festival of Books logo on it to reinforce the point.

True to her word, Mom came to L.A. for the fair this year, even though it meant driving down the weekend after Easter and the very next morning after Prince William and Catherine Middleton’s wedding.  (Yes, Mom got up at 1:00 in the morning to watch the whole thing.)  She came prepared, tote bag in hand.

This year the Festival was held at USC, in order to be more centrally located.  (Or so the website said.)  The magical book emporium lay spread across the campus, just waiting for us to offer up our attention and dollars.  Mom and I readily gave of both.  This year instead of listening to Three-Minute Stories, I heard Jamie Lee Curtis read two of her children’s books, and talk about how her four-year-old daughter inspired her to start writing.  We passed by the Mommy Brings Home the Bacon booth, and I am still kicking myself for not buying a copy of this adorable story of a little boy’s perspective on his working mom.  (Luckily, I found it online here.)  I couldn’t find the graphic artist from the previous year, but we stumbled across a book called The Jester Has Lost His Jingle, which captivated us enough to buy two copies.  Written by a college student named David Saltzman as a senior project, the book teaches kids – especially kids in hospitals – that no one can take away their joy.  As fate would have it, the young man who wrote it was diagnosed with Hodgkins’ disease a year later and passed away.  Before he died, he asked his family to have the book published and give the proceeds to kids who were sick.  For each book sold, a book is given to the children’s ward of a hospital.  (Check it out for yourself here.  Please.)

After that emotional encounter, we wandered over to the mystery section and treated ourselves to some new works at the Sisters in Crime booth.  This national organization promotes female mystery writers, and their display sported many new novels by authors I hadn’t yet sampled.  They ranged from traditional cozies to something dark and gritty enough that we thought it might interest my dad.  After picking up five or six books including a cookbook interspersed with forensic terms, we veered over to the travel area.  A quick trip through the corner booth got me a pocket-sized guide to London (handy because this year I am GOING, I mean it) and a book on eating in foreign countries for my brother.  (Why such a book called out Geoff’s name is a story unto itself, but we’ll save that for another day.)

At last, feeling heavy of tote bag and light of pocketbook, we decided to go.  We would have made it, too, if that last booth hadn’t gotten in the way, offering ideal Christmas presents for my brother Peter and his wife…you understand the predicament.

It was almost as much fun to watch my mother enjoy the event as it was to experience it myself.  She and my dad taught me to love books long before I could read them myself.  This was my chance to give her a treat in return.

Beyond just the opportunity to buy wonderful books, the day gives me peace of mind.  As much as I don’t enjoy crowds, I love the fact that 140,000 people come out of their homes to attend an event that is all about books.  Yes, as a writer, I’m hopelessly biased on the subject.  I realize this.  But even so.  Opening the pages of a book and getting lost in the descriptions of what goes on in someone else’s head teaches you things far beyond the actual content of the words.  If the author knows what they’re about, their sentences conjure up pictures in such a way that our minds take over and fill in the details that they didn’t actually say.  (One of the big reasons why movies made out of books frequently disappoint.  The scenes are usually far more vivid in your head.)  When the characters get hurt, we hurt with them.  We learn sympathy – or hopefully, its more powerful cousin, empathy – by getting to see, even if it’s just for a little while, what goes on inside someone else’s heart.  The truly wonderful author manages, even though they’ve never met us, to write down our feelings, clearer than we were able to see them for ourselves, and helps us to understand the joy and pain in our own souls.

Art is capable of expressing our innermost emotions in a variety of ways, and I celebrate them all.  But the written word is my thing, and it does my heart good to see that so many people share my passion.  I mean really – 140,000 people, books on every culture and religion that has ever existed (or not existed, in the case of the atheism booth) and not a single shot was fired.  Would that the whole world could co-exist so well.

If you find yourself in the Los Angeles area in the springtime, get thee to the Festival of Books.  It’s worth it, port-a-potties and all.  Who knows, if you go, maybe next year we can convince USC to open up the real bathrooms.

Kimberly thoroughly enjoyed the Festival of Books.  Her bank balance has more ambivalent feelings on the subject.

Tags: books, David Saltzman, Festival of Books, LA Times, reading, UCLA, USC