This May Be the Year I Go Back to the Texas Book Festival

Warning: Opinion Piece Approaching

It's almost (what used to be) my favorite time of the book year again. The Texas Book Festival is happening in Austin on October 26-27, and for many years was an event I anticipated almost exactly the way I anticipated Christmas morning when I was six years old. I started attending the festival just a couple of years after Barbara Bush started it up while she and George W were living in the Texas Governor's Mansion, a much simpler time in more ways than one as it turns out.

A $100 "Festival Friends Pass" Gets Priority Access

Austin itself was a simpler place with a lot less traffic and a festival small enough for attendees to attend just about any session that they had an interest in. There was always going to be some overlap of sessions that made it hard to choose which one to attend, of course, but back in those days sessions were not "Selling Out" more than two months before the magic weekend (see Malcolm Gladwell, below). That, however, was before attendance went up so drastically (doubled, tripled, quadrupled?) without any seating-increase for the "big name author" sessions that the odds of getting in the door became pretty heavily stacked against anyone without a connection of some sort or a willingness to pay for a Disney World-like "fast pass."

And don't even get me started on the politics of the event and the city because that's another case of well-enough-not-being-left-alone. I reached a tipping point a couple of years ago when at least 75% of the sessions I attended featured authors and/or interviewers who spent much of their allotted time making snide remarks about one particular political party and its supporters. I mean, I get it, Austin is almost certainly the most liberal city in Texas, but unless I'm in a session about a political book, or one featuring a politician turned author, I'm not there to listen to the kind of nonsense I can get on any cable news channel right from my favorite chair the other 363 days of the year. So, I quit going to the book festival.

ALREADY Sold Out

Today, though, I've run across a list of the 300 or so authors who will be at the festival in late October, and there are a bunch of them I'd love to see: Tim O'Brien, Craig Johnson, Karl Malantes, Alexander McCall Smith, Stephen Harrigan and Malcolm Gladwell (I do realize these are all men), among them. Gladwell, however, is already sold out at $35 a pop for his October 26 appearance at a local church, and I have to assume that will be his only festival appearance. I do see that John Grisham's event that morning in the same venue still has some tickets available - and it gratifies my heart a bit to see that Gladwell has outsold Grisham (it's probably wrong to feel that way...but I do). 

And there are others on my list, including three women: Oscar Cásares, Joe Landsdale, Attica Locke, Elizabeth McCracken, and Leila Meacham. Douglas Brinkley, who used to be a must-see historian for me before he jumped off the political-craziness cliff, will also be there, I see. The good news about having 300 authors show up in one place on the same weekend is that I always leave the festival having discovered a dozen or so interesting new-to-me writers. That's always fun, so this will probably be the year I head back to Austin. I'll have to wait and see what kind of mood I'm in in October.