I spent my entire day at the Decatur Book Festival, the largest independent book festival in the nation. Fantastic time.  Decatur Metro asked for reviews.  

Here’s a few of my highlights:

10.  Overhearing conversations of a completely different type than usual: “I was disappointed by his alacrity, but compelled by his virtuosic recompense.” (Ok, that doesn’t make sense, but I kid you not, DBF people used a lot of big words.)

9.  Seeing random Decatur friends and catching up on the square.

8.  Buying a cool $12 Little Shop of Stories t-shirt. (Front says, “Read.” Back has cool retro pic with, “all the cool kids are doing it.”)

7.  Billy Collins, poet laureate and just freaking hilarious, reading his work. Check out his cool project called Poetry 180 which suggests 180 poems to read every day of the school year. Not to analyze, not to sermonize, not to dissect, just to read and enjoy.

6.  I’m embarrassed to say, I hadn’t heard of Amiri Baraka before this weekend. I was assigned to volunteer at his reading, though, and was really taken by him. Of course, I bought a book:)

5.  I was the “pusher” for the Amiri Baraka signing. That means I made sure the books to sign were open to the correct page, and pushed them to an easy place for Baraka to sign. It also means I got to overhear the fascinating conversations while he signed, and take tons of pictures. Baraka told me that if pastor stuff doesn’t work out, I could have a career in photography.

4.  Decatur Presbyterian Church hosted big speakers throughout the day. Over the weekend, they will have welcomed almost 5,000 people into their sanctuary. Now that’s community involvement.

3.  John Dean speaking on US government and our current political malaise.

2.  I usually think of authors as pretty unappreciated in our society, not exactly reaping huge cultural rewards of fame. So it was cool to see people walking up to authors as if they were rock stars.

1.  Kids screamed for joy when they met (costumed) favorite characters. Parents purchased hundreds and hundreds of books for their children today. Parents reading to children. Children reading to parents. The world becoming a better place.