This weekend Austin celebrates the book. It is time once again for the annual Texas Book Festival - it's like SXSW for book nerds. The Texas Book Festival has a long tradition of bringing notable literary figures to the Texan capital. This year kicks off with America's most darling senator - besides Conrad "Tube-er-um-net" Burns - Barack Obama presenting his The Audacity of Hope on Saturday (10/28/06 - 10AM the Capitol). The first day's festivities include appearances by Lee Gutkind, Tavis Smiley, and Amy Sedaris to name only a few.

Sunday (10/29/06) boasts an equally impressive lineup with presentations dealing with everything from beekeeping to death. The climax of the weekend will undoubtedly take place at the Paramount as Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith moderates a conversation between Gore Vidal and Maureen Dowd that will not be anything like this:


It's the one weekend a year that Austin can be considered a national literary hub. To be fair Austin actually has a very strong literary scene and if you don't know you would do extremely well to ask somebody.

As an exercise in intertron-based psuedo-journalism I will be liveblogging from the actual Texas Book Festival just in case you can't be there and are very concerned with what's going on and lead a life so unfulfilling that reading a liveblog of a book festival on a lovely autumnal weekend is acceptable behavior. I'll be taking pictures and the fruit of these exhaustive and potentially inane posts will inform a wrap up post on my home for real intertron-based journalism, Austinist. Please engage the following link for maximum exposition:

[Texas Book Festival Main Page]

I'll be posting my scheduled plan of attack within the coming days and then start up with the liveblogging very shortly before Senator Obama takes the stage.

Love,
Adam.