Next weekend is the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, a sprawling outdoor affair that regularly draws 100,000 book lovers to the UCLA campus every spring. (Who says people in LA don’t read?!)
The festival is great fun. You’ll see throngs of people lined up in the sunshine outside lecture halls, waiting — and obviously excited — to join conversations about current events, current fiction, and the latest offerings from sci-fi masters and chick-lit queens. Poets give impassioned readings under the big tent outside Powell Library. Open-air stages feature celebrated chefs and celebrities touting their children’s books. I love to browse the dozens of booksellers, publishers, museums, non-profit foundations, and retailers who set up shop along UCLA’s grassy plazas.
More than 400 authors appear on Saturday and Sunday (tickets to daytime events are free), so you’ll find plenty of great choices. A festival map is here.
I’ll be at the Festival of Books on Sunday, April 27, signing copies of My California: Journeys by Great Writers from 1 to 2 pm with Edward Humes and Veronique de Turenne. Please be sure to stop by the Angel City Press Booth (#332, near Royce Hall) and say hello.
