Chapter 2 - The Festival

This is the time of year that I start prepping (aka reading) for the Savannah Book Festival which takes place in the middle of February. If you've never been there, it is a wonderful event filled with authors, books, and readers all in a city which abounds with great food and history. While there are paid events (Thursday - Opening Speaker, Friday - Keynote Speaker, and Sunday - Closing Speaker), all day on Saturday there are authors located within easy walking distance who will be talking about their books, writing styles, and any other thing which meet their fancies.

I have been going to the Savannah Book Festival (https://www.savannahbookfestival.org) for over 8 years and I think the event gets better every year. The last few years I've had our daughters along with me and this year only Claire can come as Carina is starting a new job. Some of the authors I am interested in this year include Steven Rowley (The Guncle), James L. Swanson (Manhunt), Grady Hendrix (The Final Girls Support Group), Alice McDermott (The Ninth Hour), Jenny Jackson (Pineapple Street), and Sy Montgomery (The Soul of an Octopus). While I have read some of these authors, I may not have read their latest books and look forward to doing that before the event. As always some of the authors I want to see are scheduled at the same time as others I'd like. Also there are authors (T.J. Klune and Grady Hendrix come to mind) who will be standing room only so we'll have to get to those venues early to get seats.

I have ordered three books to read before the festival and they are as follows:

Absolution by Alice McDermott - McDermott's latest is about women who want to help the people of Vietnam during the Vietnam war. Living in Saigon in 1963 they try to balance society's dictate to be helpmeets to their husbands with their own desires to do something important. Many years later one woman's daughter seeks out the other woman to see if what they did had any meaning.

The Celebrants by Steven Rowley - I fell in love with Rowley with his amazing book The Guncle so I am very excited to read his latest. The novel is about the friendship of five college friends who get together ever so often (last time 5 years ago) to give each other living funerals or to help each other through rough spots in their lives. This year one of them has a secret to share which may change their relationship and even their lives.

We Must Not Think of Ourselves by Lauren Grodstein - I mentioned this book last year as one I was looking forward to reading. A World War II book (and oddly enough, I haven't read a whole lot of those this past year), it is about the documentation of atrocities in the Warsaw Ghetto and how the scholarly men of the Jewish community made certain the world knew what was happening to them.

Have you ever been to a book festival? Let me know which ones!