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Crowds of book group aficionados flocked to San Jose for the third annual Book Group Expo, above; below, author Frances Dinkelspiel debuted her book, Towers of Gold, at the convention. |
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There are conventions for everyone: dog lovers, tattoo artists, people who trade sports memorabilia, barristas, and hairdressers. They all have their annual gatherings to swap tales, make friends, and do business.
So why shouldn’t book groups have theirs? For the third year, an estimated 1,700 people gathered over a weekend in October for Book Group Expo at the San Jose Convention Center in California’s Silicon Valley to meet authors, eat chocolate, and engage in high (and low) book talk.
Some 75 authors also made the trip, including Andre Dubus III (House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days), Gail Tsukiyama (Women of the Silk, The Street of A Thousand Blossoms), Julia Glass (Three Junes, I See you Everywhere) and Will Durst (The All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing).
Since some book groups have started reading The House of Mondavi alongside King Lear, I was invited to participate in a panel called “Where There’s A Will….Shakespeare In The 21st Century.” And let me tell you: I felt pretty sheepish when I misstated the century in which Shakespeare wrote his plays. Okay, so I was off by a hundred years!
I’m hoping the audience focused instead on the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s Austin Tichenor and Reed Martin, who brought their considerable wit to the panel. Jennifer Lee Carrell, author of the Shakespeare-inspired mystery Interred With Their Bones, was our expert, as a Harvard Ph.D. who’s directed Shakespeare’s plays. (Jenny was too kind to mention my public faux pas when we chatted afterwards.) And Kirsten Brandt, a playwright and Associate Artistic Director of the San Jose Repertory Theatre, moderated our panel with skill and good cheer.
The session, which was being videotaped, was lively and provoked a lot of laughter from the audience. One of the first comments came from Julie Robinson, the book group moderator extraordinaire and founder of L.A.’s Literary Affairs. Julie said the ongoing joke in her book groups is that all you have to do is compare a contemporary text to a story from the Bible or one of Shakespeare’s plays to sound smart. I’m hoping that will work for me next week, as my book group discusses Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (although I’m not sure Romeo and Juliet really works…).
Julie Robinson’s comment led to the question of what Shakespeare character or play reminded us of the final days of the Bush Administration. A Comedy of Errors? (Although as someone pointed out later, the past eight years have not been funny.) Perhaps Macbeth? Or Julius Caesar, with the Senators led by John McCain?
Unfortunately, we were scheduled at the same time as a session on an arguably more provocative subject: sex. Specifically, a panel titled “Makin’ Whoopee: Let Us Count The Ways,” with Karen Abbott, author of the delightful Sin in the Second City; Mary Roach, author of the bestseller Bonk; and Ellen Sussman, editor of the racy anthology Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex. While our panel had lots of murder, mayhem and intrigue, theirs was the juicier subject (and featured foxy panelists!).
The highlight of the wonderful weekend was seeing finished copies of my friend Frances Dinkelspiel’s first book, Towers of Gold, go on sale for the first time (the official publication date is Nov. 11). A labor of love that took eight years to publish, it is a beautiful book will fundamentally change our understanding of California history.
Bravo, Frances. Book Group Expo was a great place for Towers of Gold to make its debut!