Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

This past weekend was the LA Times Festival of Books, hosted at USC! I attended the festival on both Saturday and Sunday.

SATURDAY

I spent Saturday looking around at all the booths. I picked up some things at the Hi De Ho Comics book stand, and also at a secondhand books booth. At this booth I found very interesting literature, including a book which directly references a topic discussed in the General Education class: Exploring Ethnicity through Film:

This book's character: Fu-Manchu, was described by Professor Kara Keeling as a character who embodies the worse stereotypes of Asian people in the first half of the 20th century. He was characterized as the "unassimiable other". The stereotype was that Asians are always foreign to the USA, and that this "foreign-ness" is an intrinsic part of them.

The counterpoint is that the history of Asian immigration shows that Asians have been in the USA for a very long time.

After meandering through these books, I went and watched a panel of three writers, Francesca Lia Block, John Boyne, Jonathan Auxier, and Ransom Riggs. Here is a clip of Riggs reading from his new book:

SUNDAY

On Sunday I attended two speaker series. The first was a conversation between Ransom Riggs and Daniel Handler, the author of "A Series of Unfortunate Events" under the pen name "Lemony Snicket". I found the whole conversation very amusing, and it was all in all a good time. The place (Bovard) was packed.  I was sitting in about the middle, so this was the best picture I could get (Handler on the left). 

The second speaker series was of T.C. Boyle, author of "The Tortilla Curtain", a book I had read and very much enjoyed in 11th grade. He read aloud two of his short stories and also offered some insight into his creative process. I'll paraphrase something he said. "People say write what you know. I say, write what you don't know, and learn something."

Then, I ended my tour of the festival at a book stand that was selling everything for very cheap. When I arrived, the manager was yelling repeatedly, "Everything must go! Everything half off the price on the orange sticker!" 

Quite unbeatable deals...

I didn't buy these books, but I thought they were funny:

These are the books I ended up buying:

All in all, a successful weekend!