Boston Book Festival

Today was a rainy day. In the morning, we headed to a local bookstore to get a book for a birthday party that the kids were going to later. Lunch was a combination of chicken noodle soup, chicken nuggets and grilled cheese sandwiches. All perfect for a rainy day lunch! After lunch, we dropped the kids off with Julie, and D and I headed to downtown to check out the Boston Book Festival. Now, LA has had a book fair for years and I've never been because you have to get tickets to the speaker sessions, fight traffic and parking to get to UCLA and I just know it's going to be crowds everywhere. Boston is a much smaller city and we are able to get into the two sessions we were interested in without much trouble. There are lines for book signings, but we pretty much skipped those. The first session was on the power of place in books. The format was a small speech by the 4 authors which made it less dynamic and interesting. Anita Shreve and Anita Diamant were the two authors I have read, and they both were very interesting. Anita Shreve's book is now on my list to look up. Elizabeth Nunez was an author I had not heard about, but she read an excerpt from her book which was enticing. The second session we went to was on thrillers and espionage books. This time, the format was a discussion and the 3 authors and the moderator all clearly had interacted before and were very practiced in this type of conversation. They talked not just about writing this genre of book but also about what writing does for them, why they write, how it affects them and how it affects their lives. They compared their own styles with each other. I now have Joseph Finder, Andre Dubus and Stephen Carter to look up. The festival included a few booths out in Copley Square with displays. Unfortunately, it was extremely windy and many books fell to an unfortunate soggy fate. So sad to see. We saw Ken Burns in one booth signing books, had some free Brigham's ice cream (Rocky Road, delish!) and checked out some e-readers (Sony has one you can take notes on). The final session was the keynote address by Orhan Pamuk. He spoke about his new book called "The Museum of Innocence". Recently the New Yorker published a short story by him and I realized today that it was an excerpt from this book. He read a few sections out of the book and then sat for a discussion. Unfortunately, his interviewer took a political tone to his questions which immediately irritated Pamuk. Even more unfortunately, the interviewer had nowhere else to go so each new question was more irritating. Finally, Pamuk suggested taking questions from the audience and here we were in luck. Mostly really good questions came out of this, including asking about how the first person narration restricts the viewpoint of the story, about the translator and that process and others mainly focusing on the writing process. [Update: Some videos are now online for various speakers from the Festival.] We skipped the signing line up and headed for a short stroll on Newbury Street. This place totally reminds me of Yorkville in Toronto, down to the architecture. Dinner was at Brasserie JO. The place was packed so we pulled up a couple of chairs at the bar. I had their mulled cider with brandy. We shared the onion tart (delish, good flavour but lovely light texture). I had the steak frite with a really delicious blue cheese butter, D had a pork tenderloin that he polished off. Dessert for me was chocolate mousse and for D the profiteroles. Both were exceptional, and they serve them in a nice showy way! We came out of the restaurant completely stuffed and for me, I felt the price of the meal was very reasonable (compared to what I think a similar place would be in LA). The best thing about the day was not having to fight crowds for everything, like I'm used to in LA. Plus we lucked out on $10 parking as well! It was a great way to start my week in Boston.